Excerpt from The Triumph of Tim

The Vicar's name was White. In Little Pennington, however, everybody spoke of him reverentially as the Vicar. He had succeeded a famous man, a poet and a prophet to whose grave in Little Pennington churchyard pilgrims from overseas still bring themselves and votive wreaths. Tertius White was neither poet nor prophet. He would have made an admirable man of business, a great solicitor or administrator, because essentially he was interested in the affairs of others. He never sought preferment, reigning quietly over a Hampshire parish bordered on the east by breezy, high-lying downs, on the west and north by vast woods.

He was thirty-five, when he made a romantic marriage, running away with the only daughter of an Irish peer, an elopement which created something of a scandal at the time, for the father was furious and swore that he would never acknowledge the runaways. Nor did he. But he sent after them a portrait of his daughter painted by Pynsent before he achieved fame, a portrait which hung in the parson's study above the fireplace, challenging attention because it seemed preposterously out of tune with the ordered harmony of that historical workshop. Here his predecessor had laboured for more than a quarter of a century. The pilgrims regarded it as a shrine, because it contained the desk, the chair and the bookcases of the poet.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.