Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/120

 originally, as is like, it must have served as residence to the Proprietors of Slepe-Hall estate, not to the Farmer of a part thereof. Tradition makes a sad blur of Oliver’s memory in his native country! We know, and shall know, only this, for certain here, That Oliver farmed part or whole of these SlepeHall Lands, over which the human feet can still walk with assurance; past which the River Ouse still slumberously rolls, towards Earith Bulwark and the Fen-country. Here of a certainty Oliver did walk and look about him habitually, during those five years from 1631 to 1636; a man studious of many temporal and many eternal things. His cattle grazed here, his ploughs tilled here, the heavenly skies and infernal abysses overarched and underarched him here.

In fact there is, as it were, nothing whatever that still decisively to every eye attests his existence at St. Ives, except the following old Letter, accidentally preserved among the Harley Manuscripts in the British Museum. Noble, writing in 1787, says the old branding-irons, ‘O. C.,’ for marking sheep, were still used by some Farmer there; but these also, many years ago, are gone. In the Parish-Records of St. Ives, Oliver appears twice among some other ten or twelve respectable ratepayers; appointing, in 1633 and 1634, for ‘St. Ives cum Slepa’ fit annual overseers for the ‘Highway and Green’:—one of the Oliver signatures is now cut out. Fifty years ago, a vague old Parish-clerk had heard from very vague old persons, that Mr. Cromwell had been seen attending divine service in the Church with ‘a piece of red flannel round his neck, being subject to inflammation.’ Certain letters ‘written in a very kind style from Oliver Lord Protector to persons in St. Ives,’ do not now exist; probably never did. Swords ‘bearing the initials of O. C.,’ swords sent down in the beginning of 1642, when War was now imminent, and weapons were yet scarce,—do any such still exist? Noble says they were numerous in 1787; but nobody is bound to believe him.