The Ox Is Slow

The Ox Is Slow</br>This is a tale of two families and it is here where the similarity ends.</br>From the 15th and 16th centuries the Belmont family culture had been based on military leadership with its aristocratic identity conventions.</br>In 1830 Pierre Belmont was acting as a military advisor to the French court of King Louis Phillippe. Satisfied with their lifestyles he could envisage no serious alteration to his and his family's way of life.</br>At that time John Marshall and his wife Caroline were living in England near a small Norfolk village named Walpole St. Peter. Born into poverty John was an itinerant farm labourer unable to read or write with only a basic understanding of arithmetic.</br>He like Pierre Belmont could see no reasons for his or Caroline's existence to change or improve.</br>But eleven centuries before an ancient Phoenician proverb began to sew the threads of a human fabric that would have been beyond the imagination of both these men.</br>It was known as the Y Aphorism.