Micah Clarke Author:Arthur Conan, Sir Doyle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m OF TWO FRIENDS OF MY YOUTH I Fear, my children, that you will think that the prologue is over-long for the play; but the foundations must be laid before ... more »the building is erected, and a statement of this sort is a sorry and a barren thing, unless you have a knowledge of the folk concerned. Be patient, then, while I speak to you of the old friends of my youth, some of whom you may hear more of hereafter, while others remained behind in the country hamlet, and yet left traces of our early intercourse upon my character which might still be discerned there. Foremost for good among all whom I knew was Zachary Palmer, the village carpenter, a man whose aged and labor- warped body contained the simplest and purest of spirits. Yet his simplicity was by no means the result of ignorance, for, from the teachings of Plato to those of Hobbes, there were few systems ever thought out by man which he had not studied and weighed. Books were far dearer in my boyhood than they are now, and carpenters were less well paid, but old Palmer had neither wife nor child, and spent little on food or raiment. Thus it came about that, on the shelf over his bed, he had a more choice collection of books—few as they were in number—than the squire or the parson, and these books he had read until he not only understood them himself, but could impart them to others. This white-bearded and venerable village philosopher would sit by his cabin door upon a summer evening, and was never so pleased as when some of the young fellows would slip away from their bowls and their quoit-playing, in order to lie in the grass at his feet and ask him questions about the great men of old, their words and their deeds. But of all the youths I and Reuben Lockarby, the innkeeper's son, were his two favorites, for we would co...« less