“I heard the wind rustle in the dead leaves this morning, I heard it rustle over my grave, and over the world’s, and over the embers of all the stars, and I was not afraid.
“What name has my beautiful barn in heaven? In it was born a man in the sight of his brothers and sisters. God has told me my seed shall be multiplied as the sands of the sea. Can it be that out of this barn will grow the regeneration of the world, or will the forgotten memory of it trouble the well-being of some citizen far hence in time and so give birth to a flame, a prayer, a rose out of the soul of him? It is cold, yes, but the frost is one of the angels.
“A doctor has been here, a man not used to our life. He too felt that it was cold. He said that little Francis--whom Mary calls Albert Edward--is ill and may die. If he does, then it may be from the corpse of an infant the saviour of society will be born.”
These were the last words. On the day after the doctor’s visit the arrest was made. Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone and two of the children died in the infirmary of the prison. Francis Albert Edward, born at Lone Barn on Christmas Day, recovered from the effects of his birth and left the workhouse at the end of June with his mother and four brothers. I believe that after Lone Barn there was nothing they missed less than Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone. If they had been given to considering such matters, they would have said that he ought to have lived solitary and let his hair grow in Wayland’s Smithy instead of marrying and begetting seven children, of whom only two were able to die in infancy.
Lone Barn has since been burnt to the ground, and should Francis Albert Edward (his real name) or the world visit the scene of his nativity, to worship or verify the facts, they would find in that hollow of the downs only a square space of nettles, poppies, and bachelor’s buttons, amidst the turf....
Coming to the telegraph posts of Abingdon Lane--the Abingdon and Newbury road--the turf was furrowed this way and that. Gorse and thorn, surrounding the crossing of the straight, white road and the green way, made a frame as for some wayside event of no common kind, such as the birth of Francis; but the sun shone and the wind blew and betrayed nothing. Then the road was a central track of very little rutted turf, and flowers and long grass on either side; it had banks, but no thorns growing on them. The valley was beautiful, the mile-distant tedded hay looking like sea sand, the elms very dark in their lines or masses above the green corn, the villages hidden and the single farm-houses dim among trees, and the land rising beyond to a ridge saddled here and there with dark clumps on the horizon. In one place a far-off upland of newly ploughed chalk was almost snowy in misty whiteness. The clouds of the sky and the hot mist of earth dimmed the pale ploughland and the corn until the trees appeared to be floating on them as on a sea. They were cutting hay a little way off to my left, and as the horses and the mowing-machine came into sight at some speed it seemed to me that but for the seat it was probably much like a British war chariot. To the right the slope of the down was turf. Sometimes the road had a bank on each side, sometimes only on one; near the crossing of the road to East Hendred it was for a time without a bank; in other places the ditch was clearer than the bank. There was corn with its poppies, white campions, and charlock on the right, hay on the left. Woods, now on the left and now on the right, sometimes touched the road; but they never reached it from both sides at once--it never passed through a wood. In one of the roadside woods on the left a great tumulus stood disembowelled among the beeches: this was Scutchamer Knob on Cuckhamsley Hill--or, as I have heard it called, “Scotchman’s Hob.” This name an old carter had apparently justified to himself in part by the fact that an old road coming from the north--perchance from Scotland--passes close by, namely Hungerford Lane, which has a separate existence from Milton Hill near Steventon to Land’s End on Knoll End Down near Farnborough.