himself or his Mother; the sum they yielded was 1800l. With this sum Oliver stocked his Grazing-Farm at St. Ives. The Mother, we infer, continued to reside at Huntingdon, but withdrawn now from active occupation, into the retirement befitting a widow advanced in years. There is even some gleam of evidence to that effect: her properties are sold; but Oliver’s children born to him at St. Ives are still christened at Huntingdon, in the Church he was used to; which may mean also that their good Grandmother was still there.
Properly this was no change in Oliver’s old activities; it was an enlargement of the sphere of them. His Mother still at Huntingdon, within few miles of him, he could still superintend and protect her existence there, while managing his new operations at St. Ives. He continued here till the summer or spring of 1636.[1] A studious imagination may sufficiently construct the figure of his equable life in those years. Diligent grass-farming; mowing, milking, cattle-marketing: add ‘hypochondria,’ fits of the blackness of darkness, with glances of the brightness of very Heaven; prayer, religious reading and meditation; household epochs, joys and cares:—we have a solid substantial inoffensive Farmer of St. Ives, hoping to walk with integrity and humble devout diligence through this world; and, by his Maker’s infinite mercy, to escape destruction, and find eternal salvation, in wider Divine Worlds. This latter, this is the grand clause in his Life, which dwarfs all other clauses. Much wider destinies than he anticipated were appointed him on Earth; but that, in comparison to the alternative of Heaven or Hell to all Eternity, was a mighty small matter.
The lands he rented are still there, recognisable to the Tourist; gross boggy lands, fringed with willow trees, at the east end of the small Town of St. Ives, which is still noted as a cattle-market in those parts. The ‘Cromwell Barn,’ the pretended ‘House of Cromwell,’ the etc. etc. are, as is usual in these cases, when you come to try them by the documents,
- ↑ Noble, i. 106,
