Pearls and Prodigals

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 8

Pearls and Prodigals

THE QUIET CORNER.

(Written for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missloner.) It was a foggy night in London, some sixteen or seventeen years ago, when, past the hour of midnight, I drank a cup of coffee at a coffee stall on Hyde Park Corner. A strange crowd forgathered there each night. The majority of them were “down and out.” Sometimes an opera-hatted man from a West End , club would take a snack, more in the spirit of adventure than from any actual need of refreshment. * On tills particular night 1 took special notice of a strange old man, with a shaggy beard, who stood next to me. He betrayed evidences of culture, and yet, judging by his attire, he was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. I made his acquaintance. He mas the prodigal son of an English judge. He was living on the husks that the swine did eat. lie had few acquaintances and no friends, so he told me, but teas on excellent terms with the Muse. He shotved me some of his “stuff,” writte?i ivith a blunt pencil on torn paper. At once I was transported from coffee stalls to airy palaces and fields of asphodels. We trended our way through the foggy night to no particular where. We stopped every now and then beneath the hazy light of a huge arc lamp while I read more; of his poems , to his intense delight. The warmth of my appreciation seemed to save him from feeling the coldness of the night. He left me, or, rather, I left him, at the place where I first had met him, at the coffee stall on Hyde Park Corner *. whither we had returned to share each other’s hospitality. 1 have often thought since of that man. He might have been Francis Thompson, that one-time London derelict, who icrote “The Hound of Heaven,” for all I knew. Whoever he was, he furnished me with further evidence with which to support this theory, that, as the pearl is found within and beneath the hard and ugly exterior of an oyster’s shell, so the greatest pearls of wisdom and inspiration arc most often hid beneath the most u?ipromising exteriors. NEXT WEEK: TATTENHAM CORNER.