Old Delabole Author:Eden Phillpotts General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1915 Original Publisher: The Macmillan Company Subjects: History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access... more » to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III GRANDFATHER NUTE If Wilberforce Retallack was old for his age and had worn ill, it could be said with equal truth of his father-in-law, James Nute, that time treated him lightly. Given a constitution, it is the personal factor of disposition that decides, for anxious mind and fretful spirit gnaw the flesh that holds them, as a sharp acid corrodes the vessel that contains it. Grandfather Nute's tranquil soul looked out of blue eyes, and his seventy-two years of life still found him straight in the back, full of energy, steadfast of heart, and rich in faith. 'If you believe in God, you be bound to believe in man,' declared Grandfather Nute, and he lived up to the conviction. But he was no mere optimist, and his philosophy embraced a second axiom. 'If you believe in man, you be bound to believe in the Devil,' was another of his reiterated observations. But in his opinion the powers of evil retreated. The world was a better place than he remembered it in his youth. His sphere of action had been entirely limited to North Cornwall, yet he judged the whole from a part, and affirmed with confidence that while Delabole moved steadily in the right direction, the rest of the earth could not be lagging very far behind. Whether his native village merely took part in the upward drift, or actuallyoccupied a place in the van, James Nute would have admitted himself incompetent to judge; but at his heart he believed that Old Delabole did rather more than its share in the advance move' ment. He attributed this fact to John Wesley. The s...« less