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The internal arrangements at Plowden Hall, Shropshire, give one a good idea of the feeling of insecurity that must have been so prevalent in those "good old days." Running from the top of the house there is in the thickness of the wall, a concealed circular shoot about a couple of feet in diameter, through which a person could lower himself, if necessary, to the ground floor by the aid of a rope.
The only possible place for a house in Shropshire is on a hill; but, for my part, I think the country is too far from London, and the scenery nothing special. Margaret could not resist saying, "Why did you go there, then?" "I because " He drew his head back and grew rather angry. "Why have we come to the Tyrol, if it comes to that? One might go on asking such questions indefinitely."
But now that you are confidential secretary and adviser to a Shropshire Psmith, the thing must stop. Your secretarial duties must be paramount. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with them. Yes. The thing must stop before it goes too far. 'It seems to me, said Mike, 'that it has gone too far. I've got the sack. I don't know how much farther you want it to go.
'O, Miss Dacre! if you knew the agony of my mind! 'Do not speak; for Heaven's sake, do not speak! He turned off from the lawn, and approached by a small circuit the gate of the ground. Suddenly he perceived a carriage on the point of going off. It was the Duchess of Shropshire's. 'There is the Duchess of Shropshire! You know her; but not a minute is to be lost.
The ladies of Grafton Street had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in Westmoreland. There was nothing very definite about the date of their coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had, somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him.
His death opened the way for the succession of his brother, Robert of Belleme, to the great English possessions of their father in Wales, Shropshire, and Surrey, to which he soon added by inheritance the large holdings of Roger of Bully in Yorkshire and elsewhere.
What I learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds.
One of these clerks in the middle of the eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of wretchedness and despair.
He'd taken to me and our Betty, and used often to call and have a cup of tea with us. He knowed how I wished to get away from Langhurst; and one night he says to me, `I've a nephew, John Walters, down at Fairmow, in Shropshire. He's one of the right sort. I heard from him a while since as his squire wants a steady man to overlook a small colliery as he's got on his estate.
Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town, There lived a widow with her only son: She had no wealth nor title to renown, Nor any joyous hours, never one. She rose from ragged mattress before sun And stitched all day until her eyes were red, And had to stitch, because her man was dead. This is one of the best narrative poems in modern literature.
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