With these words he went away forever. I had not even asked his name, nor had he asked mine. We were just two wayfarers passing each other on life’s highway. He had brought me a message, and then departed. But there are other worlds beyond this. We had perhaps been introduced for this future. For I do believe that no one touches our life here, who has not some business or right to do so. For our lives before this life and our lives yet to be are all one, separated only by the little sleep we call death.
I reached Ripon just at nightfall, and the quiet of the cathedral city, its closed houses, and peaceful atmosphere, did not please me. After the stress and rush of the West Riding, I thought the place must be asleep. On the third morning I asked myself, “What are you doing here? What has the past to give you? To-day is perhaps yours—Yesterday is as unattainable as To-morrow.” Then the thought of New York stirred me, and I hastened and took the fastest train for Liverpool, and in eight days I had crossed the sea, and was in New York and happily and busily at work again.
But I did not dismiss Annis from my memory and when the first mutterings of the present war was heard, I remembered Squire Antony, and his charge to the weavers of Annis—“It may so happen,” he said, “that in the course of years, some nation, that has lost the grip of all its good senses, will try to invade England. It isn’t likely, but it might be so. Then I say to each of you, and every man of you, without one hour’s delay, do as I have often heard you sing, and say you would do:—
“ ‘Off with your Labor Cap! rush to the van!
The sword for your tool, and the height of your plan
To turn yoursen into a fighting man!
Would they do so?
As I repeated the squire’s order, I fell naturally into the Yorkshire form of speech and it warmed my heart and set it beating high and fast.
Would the ‘Yorkshires’ still honor the charge Squire Annis had given them? Oh, how could I doubt it! England had been in some war or other, nearly ever since the squire’s charge, and the ‘Yorkshires’ had always been soon and solid in rushing to her help. It was not likely that in this tremendous struggle, they would either be too slow, or too cold. Not they! Not they! They were early at the van, and doubly welcome; and they are helping at this hour to fight a good fight for all humanity; and learning the while, how to become of the highest type of manhood that can be fashioned in this world. Not by alphabets and books, but by the crucial living experiences that spring only from the courses of Life and Death—divine monitions, high hopes and plans, that enlarge the judgment, and the sympathies, the heart and the intellect, and that with such swift and mysterious perfection, as can only be imparted while the mortal stands on the very verge of Immortality.
Very soon, now, they will come home bringing a perfect peace with them, then! how good will be their quiet, simple lives, and their daily labor, and their Paper Cap!