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ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT WORK IN THE FOREST.

CONTENTS

The charm of knights lies partly in the fact that they have the spirit of great grown-up boys and girls. They are boys because they are as careless of danger and as eager for an adventure at forty as they are at fourteen. They sing of

Their energy and zest are inexhaustible. The oldest and weariest of them leaves the most eager of Boy Scouts panting breathlessly behind.

Yet they are also, in a sense grown-up girls, for they healthily let out all the feelings which a modern boy is ashamed to own. After a lusty fight, in which he has cheerfully taken and given a hundred hard blows, a knight will weep at the sight of a brother whom he has not seen for many months, and will eagerly fall on his neck and kiss him. When Arthur’s knights went out, a hundred and fifty strong, on the splendid quest, the mighty king himself “could not speak for weeping.”

The knights in this book are just people who have carried the boy’s wild joy of living and the girl’s sensitiveness into the fighting days of manhood.

Mr. William Watson writes of that world “of crimson and of gold,” with

Mr. Watson, however, wonders whether the day of chivalry is dead, and he asks—

There have, indeed, always been some knights false to the Quest and cowardly in the face of adventure. And many pilgrims have dropped into a comfortable seat in the inn-parlour before their pilgrimage was well begun. But the Quest still shines, high and unsullied. The great adventure is to follow that Quest. And there are as many adventures for the boy or girl or grown-up today as ever there were in “the forest of adventure” itself.

Adventures are to the venturesome. This is as true today as it was a thousand years ago. All the knights and pilgrims in this book had real adventures, though some never touched a sword, and others died only yesterday. The reason why so few of us achieve them is that the first hard knock sends us home whimpering. The heroes of these stories had exciting adventures because, when they started on their quest, they took all the risks and hazards.

The greatest of our school songs declares that there are still

This book salutes that fearless and eager young chivalry of today, the Table Round of the Twentieth Century. Then—out swords for

No Quest, no Adventure! No Quest, no Conquest!

THE SPLENDID QUEST

It was the high noon of dog-roses when Ernest and I looked out across the narrow valley to the spur of the Pilgrims’ Way. A waft of the scent of sweet-briar marks the hour when he asked, “What is that curly white path that wiggles up the hill?” Behind us the copse of larches lifted a thousand lances to the sky. The wind galloped over the hill from the south-west, sweeping across the thirty miles of the Weald that spreads between us and the sea.

We were standing in my front garden, looking over its low shrubs across the narrow Holmesdale that makes a cradle for Reigate. On the other side of the valley rose the steep chalk-downs. They rose sheer out of the smoke that swept towards Kent across the huddled old roofs of the town. They rose so high that we could see the beech trees on the top tangling their branches in the woolly clouds that hurried along the ridge. A white curving ribbon swept upward from the town to the crest of the hills in such a taking wave that our eyes could not choose but follow. This was Ernest’s “curly white path.”

“That,” I said, “is the Pilgrims’ Way, and it runs right along the top of the hills.”

“What?” asked Ernest, “is the Pilgrims’ Way, and why is it at the top of the hill?”

Ernest is good at questions. The tops of trees fascinate him. When he has climbed and climbed, till he stands on the very last creaking fork that will bear him, he is happy: the wider view answers so many questions. But he is restless again; for it suggests more new problems. He cranes his neck for a view of the farthest hills—or a still higher tree. He always aches to know what is round the next corner or over the last ridge.

Now he wanted to know what is a Pilgrim and why he has a Way and why the Way is on the top of the hill instead of in the valley?

“What do you say to walking across and seeing for ourselves?” I asked.

In a flash he was gone and emerged a minute later, his pockets bulging with apples, and in his hand one of the armful of Papuan spears that we keep in the umbrella-stand.

“Once upon a time,” I said, as we swung down the hill and through the old town, “when the Ancient Briton fought wolves and men with bows and arrows, bronze hatchets and spears, he found that he could see his enemy (the other Britons) much better if he walked on the ridge of the hills. This valley was very marshy and full of tangled bushes. There were no hedges, no fields, no ditches—no trespassing!”

Ernest’s twelve-year-old Ancient British heart stirred him to a wild whoop and the shaking of his spear at the joy of such a life. This startled an Ancient Flemish horse in a brewer’s dray, and I hastily drew Ernest into Slipshoe Street, where he would do less damage.

“Is it Slipshoe Street,” asked Ernest, “because it is steep and chalky up the hill and when it is wet your shoe slips?”

It is so rare for him to suggest probable answers to his own questions that I hailed this daring and original theory as certainly the right one. We proceeded under the overhanging eaves of the old timbered houses and climbed the hill; the Papuan spear being used as an Alpenstock—or a Pilgrim’s Staff.

The walking was too steep for further talk even before we came to the White Way itself. There we fell, like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, from running to walking, and from walking to clambering on hands and knees. Ernest, with the little breath that remained in his body, said that the great, soft, greyish, rounded slopes looked like a giant watch-dog lying down, and it made him want a giant hand with which to pat it.

When we had toiled almost to the top we threw ourselves on the ground. It was great gain to get Ernest to a point where he was really glad to lie down and rest. We lay on our backs and, looking upward, watched the great, high “pillowy billowy” clouds roll across their sea of blue, while skirmishing wisps of torn clouds scudded in shreds before the lower breeze which swept through the beeches behind us. We lifted our heads and looked south-west across the great Weald of Sussex to the drop in the South Downs where Chanctonbury Ring stood out some thirty-five miles away. We turned west, looking across Surrey to the mighty Leith Hill which couched like a lion on the spring, sniffing the air as it came up from the Channel.

We turned over and face downward revelled in the miracle of tousled grass. It sparkled with the dainty yellow of hop-trefoil; it was dotted with daisies, Speedwell and the brilliant scarlet Pimpernel. Lazily Ernest turned and, putting his head into a fragrant pillow of wild thyme, said comfortably, with one hand on his trusty spear—

“Now—about the Pilgrims’ Way.”

“That Ancient Briton,” I said, “walked, with his spear, on the top of the hills so that he might see his enemy and have the advantage of fighting from above, while keeping out of the marshes and tangled brushwood. He crept along the crest of these great chalk-downs and made those tracks along the hills that have been followed by men in the thousands of years ever since.

“One day as the Britons of Surrey were on their hills they saw the glint of shields and shining helmets such as had never been worn in these islands before. The soldiers who wore them came marching up the hill, and the Britons hurled their spears down as they had always done. But the sturdy men-at-arms who came steadily up the hill had locked their shields together in one flat roof over their heads. The regiment looked like a great tortoise crawling up the hill under a monstrous shell. On the shell the British spears rained harmlessly. Above it stood the brazen standard of the eagle. There was something awful and irresistible in the uncanny steady advance of the hidden force of men. And the Britons broke and fled.

“So the Roman men-at-arms conquered. And along this ridge they marched with steady tramp, scorning the round encampments of the Britons (which you can still see on some of these heights), and throwing up great dykes and square camps of their own. These Romans began to drain and clear the marshes in the valley and threw great roads as straight as a strung bowline across the Weald. But still their helmets gleamed on this high chalk Way that was old even when they came and ran from the far-off port of Southampton through Hampshire and Berkshire and Surrey into the heart of Kent.

“From their far-away home across Europe the call came to the Romans to return to Italy and fight for their own land. But even before they went, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, sturdy sea-fighters had landed in England, so that when the Britons crept back on to the top of this chalk hill to look over the great valley, they found behind them a new enemy that came charging down from London, with hair flying in the wind. The Saxons, with wild barbaric shouts, drove the Britons over the hill and into the valley. To the Saxons these mighty hills became a gigantic rampart whence they could repulse enemies. Along these hills they galloped with their horses.”

As I said this, we heard the thud of hoofs on the Way among the Birches and caught a glimpse of a flying white mane and tail. Ernest sat up and lifted his spear as a horse bearing a young farmer went thundering by, a flashing gleam of whiteness on the grey-green face of the rounded hill.

From a curve in the downs there come the sound of bleating. Slowly the sound drew nearer and the white sheep, nibbling the young grass and bleating to their fast-growing lambs, threw a sidelong look at us as they trotted on again. They passed us with the muffled sound of a thousand cloven feet. It was a whispering roar—as of thunder heard distantly across a beech forest. Behind them strode the shepherd, bearing a long crook in his hand and wearing a buff smock-frock. His hair was fair, and as he glanced at us the eyes of a Saxon looked out.

“They came along the Way,” I whispered to Ernest, “like the horseman and this shepherd exactly a thousand years ago. The sheep, the men and the horses are the same now as they were then.”

“Ah,” he said, shaking his spear, “I knew just what an Ancient Briton felt like when the Saxon on his horse came tearing by.” And as he spoke Ernest tugged from the grass where he had been digging with his fingers an arrow-headed flint, left on the Way by the men who hunted there even before the Britons.

“Yes,” I said, “you felt like that. But even the Saxons were driven across these hills by still fiercer Danes with mighty battle-axes that clove through helmet and skull. Then came across the Channel a craftier and more awful foe, William the Norman and his followers in mail and with sword and axe. And the Saxon was set to feed his master’s sheep—like the Saxon who has just passed by—to build his master’s castle like the one which used to stand on the woody mound down there in the valley.”

Ernest lifted his head from its pillow of thyme to look down into Reigate where some of the stones of the ancient castle have been built into a newer tower-gate.

“The Castle has gone,” I said, “but the Pilgrims’ Way remains. It is about time we came to the ‘pilgrims’.”

Ernest, whose bright teeth were crunching an apple, nodded agreement.

“Well, seven hundred years ago in Canterbury, which lies right along at the end of these hills over there in the east, Thomas a Becket was killed before the altar in the great church by the fierce knights of Henry. His brave death while defending his own church, unarmed but unafraid, made good men all over Europe feel that he was a real hero, a Knight of the Cross—so he was made a saint.

“People came from many lands to visit his tomb at Canterbury and to pray there for such a brave, hardy spirit as his. These were the pilgrims. Some walked on foot and some came on horseback; some came from the counties of England, and many crossed from the countries of Europe. Often those from Europe came hundreds of miles up from the West Country and from Southampton. The roads in the valleys were often mere quagmires of mud, but on the tops of the hills the road was generally dry, while the springy turf cooled the pilgrims’ sandalled feet. So this ancient track on the chalk hills came to be called the Pilgrims’ Way.

“The brown-robed pilgrim strode along, with his long gown tucked up under the rope that was tied round his waist. This gave freer movement to his tanned legs and feet as he swung along the crest of the hills, the dew on the bracken cooling his ankles. He would nod and call a greeting to the shepherd-boy who lay whistling on the mound under which was buried some chief.

“Behind the pilgrim there would sound the quick thud of a prancing horse. Turning to look back, the wanderer would see a Knight whose sword swung in its scabbard on the horse’s side, while a Cross was blazoned on his shield which bore the dints of many shrewd sword strokes. The Knight’s horse was a fine tall black creature, with tossing mane, and the contrast was almost comical when he caught up the broad-backed, stout-legged nag of a vigorous miller, whose wife had dusted the last fleck of flour from his grey jerkin.

“Lingering behind these came a poor Oxford scholar on a sorry, raw-boned horse which caught a snatch of grass here and there as its absentminded rider rode on, with his thoughts deep in a black-letter book. But, however much the student seemed to be taken up with his reading, when he had a mind, nobody could play off more mischievous tricks on fellow-travellers. And the miller would look suspiciously at him out of the corner of his eye, to see whether any pranks were being prepared.

“A lusty song filled the air; and the pilgrims were joined by the vigorous twenty-year-old son of a country squire. When he stopped carolling, this strapping young wanderer would tell his fellow-travellers of wonderful voyages in France and Holland. But his boasting quieted down when the party of pilgrims was joined by a demure Prioress who was accompanied by a nun. The Prioress was dignified yet made good cheer with the others, while alongside rode a Monk on a horse as strong and lively as that of the Knight himself.

“So, on just such a day as this—a day of sun and wind and cloud—the Knight and Miller, the Student and Baker, the Friar and the Carpenter wandered along this high Pilgrims’ Way with their faces turned east. Every man of them rode or strode with a quest in view. Each was spurred along by some aim. The desire of one was for healing; another wished to shine in the eyes of his neighbours. Some came for the sheer joy of the journey. Many came for all these reasons together. But always there was before them the thought of the hero, Thomas a Becket, who had quite willingly died rather than give up his Faith.

“As they trudged over those hills to the east away into Kent, and at last came in sight of the great square towers of Canterbury, the pilgrims seemed to have reached the City of their Quest. The sun would be setting behind them in the north-west sky, and—as it lengthened out their own shadows as they stood on the shoulder of the last hill—its light would glow on the towers and pinnacles and gleaming windows of the great cathedral, till it seemed the dazzling centre of a Golden City.

“Their chatter would cease. A strange awe and silence would come on the pilgrims as, with tired feet, they walked through the narrow, winding, cobbled alleys of Canterbury and into the great cathedral church. There they knelt by the tomb of Thomas, the Hero. Out of the glimmering twilight of that mighty aisle there looked, from niche and column and window, the gathered heroes and heroines who had achieved their Quest; from Peter, the daring fisherman of Galilee, and Paul, the adventurous sailor of the Mediterranean, down to Bertha, the Lady of Gaul, who sailed across the Channel to bring her Faith to the people of Kent.

“As Knight and Carpenter, Prior and Ploughman knelt there side by side, they, with all the host of those heroic men and women, looked beyond the tomb of Thomas to the glorious and radiant Hero and King. The Pilgrims’ Way had led to Him. Jesus had made His own heroic Pilgrims’ Way up a Hill to a Cross. He had achieved the Splendid Quest. And it was in the wake of His conquest that every pilgrim and hero and saint had striven along the Way.”

As I stopped speaking, Ernest lifted his head.

“Did those knights and pilgrims have adventures,” he asked.

“Always,” I replied. “If you are a real knight or pilgrim you cannot help having adventures.”

“I would like to hear about them,” he said. “But I would like better still to have adventures myself.”

So the stories in this book came to be told.

A tall, dark-haired boy walked along a deer-path through the wild backwoods of America, singing as he swung up the track with an axe over his shoulder. He was dressed in deer-skin trousers and moccasins, and a coarse hunting-shirt fastened round his waist with a leather strap. He was fourteen years old, but was already nearly six feet high. Long arms and legs gave him the ungainly look of a wild colt. His hands and feet were large; his face was tanned to a dark brown. His hair, stiff and black, stood up in a rough mop, refusing to be brushed straight—though he never tried very hard.

His keen, deep-set eyes glanced round quickly through the trees and undergrowth. He picked out a strong, straight tree that looked good for making into stout boards. He rolled up his sleeves. Then swinging his axe in the air, he brought it down on the trunk near the root with a swiftness and force that drove through the bark and cut out a large chip. Blow after blow rained on the tree. The sweat broke from the boy’s forehead, and he stopped to wipe it from his eyes. His full lips were set with determination. The muscles of his arms showed through his swarthy skin like a steel cable. At length the ground was strewn with chips; the gap in the tree-trunk grew larger and deeper; the branches shivered and shook under the blows. The tree trembled, swayed, was caught by a gust of wind, and then fell to earth with a crash of branches and a thud.

Young Abe sat on the stump of the fallen tree to rest, having picked up from where he had placed them close at hand, a book and some bread and bacon in a cloth. The book was Robinson Crusoe, which the boy eagerly read as he ate his rough lunch. Then rising he worked hard with his axe, lopping branches from the tree till there was only the bare trunk left.

He should have been at school. But his father, Thomas Lincoln, was so poor that young Abe went out into the woods to swing his axe for bread. Indeed, in all his life he hardly had a year’s schooling. But he revelled in books.

The sun was now sinking. So Abe Lincoln set out again for home with his axe once more on his shoulder and his long legs carrying him down the path at a swinging pace, till he reached the clearing in the forest which he called “home.”

The cabin was built of hewed logs, some of which Abe had cut himself. It was eighteen feet square, with a loft in which he slept. Three-legged stools were the chairs. The bedstead was made of poles fastened in the cracks of the logs on one side and supported by a stake on the other. The table was of rough, strong wood. There was now a door, though for years they had been even without door or windows. The door and windows were put in when Abe and his brother had a new step-mother, who—unlike the stepmothers in fairy tales—was wonderfully kind and made them all very happy.

Abe stooped his tall body to go in at the doorway and, after his supper, lay flat on the floor by the wood fire, with his father’s enormous wooden shovel by him. The shovel was his copy-book. For, having no paper or pencil or pens or ink, and not even owning a slate, he loved to lie on the floor in the evening, and reach out his hand for a glowing twig from the fire. He tapped the twig on the floor till the glow died out, and then wrote with the charred end of the twig on the wooden shovel, doing sums or writing bits from Æsop’s Fables, The Life of Washington, or The Bible. These, with The Pilgrim’s Progress and a History of the United States, were the only books he ever saw as a boy. And he had to walk many miles in order to borrow some of these.

When he had filled the wooden shovel with writing or sums, he did not stop; but he got his father’s plane and shaved the writing off so that he could begin again on a clean “slate.” The smooth side of the split logs of which the cabin was built was on the inside, so young Abe used to go round doing his writing on the walls with charred twigs or a rough bit of chalk.^[1] Then he would go up a ladder into his little loft to bed. First thing in the morning, when the sun came through the cracks in the roof, he would start reading one of his books. One night the rain came through the roof on to The Life of Washington. It was borrowed, so Abe, who had no money, was obliged to cut corn for his neighbour’s horse for two days to pay the damage to the cover of the book. “At the end of two days,” Lincoln told a friend, “there was not a corn blade left on a stalk in the field. I wanted to pay full damage for all the wetting the book got.”

By the time he was nineteen Abe Lincoln was six feet four inches high in his moccasins. He was the strongest young man within many miles. Several people who knew him say that he was as strong as three ordinary men. He once lifted and carried a quarter of a ton weight, and at another time walked away with a pair of logs while three men were discussing whether all of them together could possibly carry the logs. A friend said, “He could strike with a mallet a heavier blow—could smite an axe deeper into wood than any man I ever saw.”

Once, when a party of friends had come on an ox wagon through the ford of a river which was partly frozen, they found, on reaching the farther side, that a dog had been left on the other bank. The thin, cracking ice, with the water lapping over where it was broken, frightened the dog so that he could not cross. Abe took off his moccasins and, turning up his deer-skin trousers, waded with his long legs through the ice-cold water and carried the dog across the river. It was bitterly cold for Abe, but that was how he liked to use his strength and his long legs and arms. He enjoyed being so very strong, but he did not use his great muscles much in fighting other fellows. When he did fight it was usually to stop somebody big from bullying a weaker boy.

Often when he was out alone in the great forests, he would stand up on the stump of some tree that he had cut down, and he would make believe that the silent trees were people, and give them a speech full of dry jokes, hard facts and splendid thoughts.

At last, when Abe was twenty-one, his father set out to go still deeper into the forests. Abe with his axe cleared the path so that the furniture might be carted through the undergrowth. When they got to a good place for a home he cut down trees to clear a space for a house. Then he helped to build the new log house for his father and for his step-mother—who was, as I say, always very kind to him. He finished the work by putting up a fence of logs which he had himself split. Then he set out to seek his fortune, leaving the great forests.

He went down the broad Mississippi River on a flat-boat to take a cargo of goods to New Orleans. When in the southern city he first saw slavery. He went into a slave auction-room. As he saw the negro slaves he remembered how, in the book he had read about the United States, it said that the whole nation was based on the truth of these words, “All men are born free and equal.” It made him angry to see men making slaves of other men and women—and even of boys and girls. But when he saw them take a mulatto girl and make her run up and down to see if she was strong, and then feel her—like a sheep in a cattle-market—to see how much money she was worth, Abe was burning with rage. He ground his teeth together and said to his friends—

It was his Quest—his Splendid Quest. Some of his friends thought that it was absurd for a young man with no money or powerful friends and with no education in any big school—to talk of “hitting slavery hard.” For thousands of very rich men owned hundreds of thousands of slaves all over the Southern States of North America. What could he do?

He went away and began to read books of law. He earned his living in many ways. Once he kept a shop for a short time, and it amused people to come in and find Lincoln lying full length on the counter, with his heels in the air, reading a hard book on the Constitution of the United States. At other times he was a captain in a war with American Indians, a postman, a surveyor, and, lastly, a lawyer. But wherever he was there were always many people gathering round him in groups, because he told the funniest stories, knew the most interesting facts, and could make the best speech in the whole countryside. But when he had kept people roaring with laughter or fascinated by the power of his speeches for hours, he would go away to his room, and work at Euclid and German grammar long after everybody else was asleep.

The result of his speeches and powerful arguments was that, when he was twenty-five, he was elected to the Parliament of Illinois—that is, the small Parliament in one of the American States. Once, later on, when defeated in another election, he said that he was like the boy who stumped his toe: it hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry.

Then his great chance came to fulfil his Quest. A mighty speaker named Douglas said that they ought to make a law that any State in America could have slaves if it liked. Lincoln said that they ought to go back to the Constitution: that all men were born free and equal, and not have slaves at all. So these two men went all over the country speaking against one another. Sometimes they made speeches for about four hours without stopping. Boys who were there enjoyed Abraham Lincoln’s jokes and good stories in his speeches. But sometimes they went to sleep before he had finished. Then the great election of President of the United States came, and because of these wonderful speeches saying what America ought to do, Lincoln, amid noisy shouting and cheering, booing and processions, was made President of the United States.

When he went to Washington, where the President always lives, the people who had not seen Lincoln before wondered at his great height and rough face. He stood there with his large head of shaggy hair (it would not brush straight even when he was President), his wrinkled and furrowed brown face, his large, strong, broad nose, his eyes looking out now with a joke and now with sadness under his dark eyebrows, his long arms and legs, in clothes that never could be made to fit him.

Somebody in the crowd—it was not a boy—said, “What a common-looking fellow!” Lincoln heard, and turning round, said with a smile, “Yes, God likes common-looking fellows. That’s why He has made so many of them.”

The slave states in the South rebelled against the North. They knew that Lincoln would try to end their keeping of slaves. Cannon began to boom and rifles to fire. Cavalry charged across the field of battle with the thunder of horses and the rattle of arms. Lincoln loved peace and hated war. But for the sake of the slaves and for his country he set to work to build ships and get an army that could conquer.

You know how strong Lincoln was. But the awful anxiety of knowing that the freedom of hundreds of thousands of slaves depended on him, and the hard work of governing the great country when it was divided in a great civil war, almost wore him to a thread. When he was in the very thick of it all, a widow came asking him to pardon her son—a soldier—who was to be shot for disobedience. The President examined the case, found that he could pardon the soldier, and signed a form setting him free. The mother went away rejoicing, for her son, whom she had expected to die, was to live. A friend, who was with Lincoln on that day, scolded the President kindly, saying, “If you attend to little matters like that you will kill yourself.”

Abraham Lincoln’s eyes gleamed and his strong, furrowed face broke into a smile as he said—

At last the war was over—President Lincoln had won. The slaves were free. Flags waved over every house, and bells rocked and rang in steeple and tower. Bands played and the people sang for joy. The negroes called Lincoln “Father Abraham,” because he had made them free. Boys who shouted and laughed, clapped and danced on that day are grey-haired negroes today, but they remember the glorious hour. President Lincoln went to the Opera House and laughed like a school-boy as he watched the players.

Suddenly a shot was heard, and the sound of a struggle. A man leapt from President Lincoln’s box and fled across the stage. Abraham Lincoln, the Messiah of the Negro, was dead—killed because he had freed the negro from slavery.

As a young man, you remember, he had with bugle clearness sounded his Quest—“When I get the chance to hit slavery, I’ll hit it hard.” He had hit hard. He swung his axe at the root of the tree of slavery and it fell with a crash. They might take his life, but they could not make the free men slaves again. He had followed his Quest—and won.

In a great hall, more than fifteen hundred years ago, all the knights who served King Arthur were sitting down to dinner. Suddenly the clatter of horse’s hoofs sounded in the cobbled courtyard. The great door was flung open, and a fair gentlewoman, on a horse that breathed hard and was covered with sweat, rode straight into the hall. She got off the horse’s back, walked to the head of the table, where King Arthur sat by the side of Queen Guenevere, and courtsied to him.

“Damsel, God bless thee,” said King Arthur.

“Sir,” she replied, “will you tell me where Sir Launcelot is?”

King Arthur pointed to the splendid knight and said, “Yonder, you see him.”

Then the maiden went up to Launcelot and asked him to ride with her into the forest. Now it was the rule of every good knight that whenever any woman needed his help he should go at once and do everything that he could do for her. The dinner, which was a high feast was just being brought in; and Launcelot, who was always riding in the open air, was very hungry. Nor could he find out why the damsel wanted him to ride into the forest. He did not even know her name. But he stood up at once and said smilingly—

“I will gladly go with you.” Then turning to his man he said, “Go, saddle my horse and bring me my sword and helmet and shield.”

The damsel and the knight rode together through the forest of adventure. It was springtime, and the sun shone brightly through the new red leaves of the oak trees and glanced through the dancing twigs of the silver birch. Launcelot, sitting erect on his sturdy brown horse and looking broad and strong in his fine armour, was like a great sinewy oak, while the slender damsel, on her prancing palfrey and clad in silvery grey, was like the silver birch—the Lady of the Forest.

They rode into a great valley, where they came to an abbey. Twelve nuns in this abbey came to Launcelot, leading to him a fine, strong young man, whose body was so perfect and whose face was so handsome that one could not find his match in the world. The nuns said to Sir Launcelot—

“Sir, we bring you here this child whom we have fed and taught, and we pray you to make him a knight.”

When Sir Launcelot found that the young man—whose name was Galahad—also wished it, he made him a knight, saying to him—

“God make you as good as you are beautiful.”

When Launcelot returned to King Arthur next day and they were going to sit down to dinner, a young man rushed up to the King and said—

“Sir, there is beneath at the river a great stone above the water, and therein I saw sticking a sword.”

The King and his knights hurried down to the river. There they saw the sword in the stone, and on the hilt, in letter of jewels and gold, were these words—

Many knights tried to drag the sword from the stone, but they could not move it at all, and when they were tired of trying they went back to their dinner. While they were feeding, young Galahad was led in by an old man, who took him to the seat at the table called “Perilous.” Sir Galahad was the first man who ever dared to sit there, for it was kept for the best knight in the world. And the other knights wondered at this, because Sir Galahad was so young.

After dinner they went down to the river again, taking the Queen and the ladies to see the sword in the stone. And young Galahad, who had a scabbard but no sword, put out his hand and drew the sword from the stone quite easily.

Then the King took them all to a field where they jousted, taking spears and charging at one another. Galahad threw one knight after another from horseback. After this they all went back to Camelot to supper. It was a feast on the four hundred and fifty-fourth anniversary of that day when the Holy Spirit of God came upon Peter and John and the other Apostles as they sat at supper in Jerusalem. And after the knights had been to evensong in the great church, they began their meal. Then there suddenly came a crash of thunder and a flashing beam of light, seven times brighter than a sunbeam at mid-day.

In the shining of this wonderful light the knights looked at each other and it seemed to each of them that his friends looked more splendid and strong than they had ever looked before. And every knight found on the table in front of him the food which he enjoyed most of all in the whole world. But they soon stopped eating and looking at one another; for they saw, carried into the hall by invisible hands and covered with a fair white cloth of samite, the Holy Grail, a Cup in which was the blood of Jesus Christ, which He shed when He suffered—as the first and perfect Knight and King—for those who were not so strong as He.

No man in the great Hall, however, could see the Cup itself because, as I say, it was hidden by a lovely cloth. And it was said that the Cup would always remain invisible except to the absolutely pure in heart.

Sir Gawaine, who was one of the mightiest knights at the Table of King Arthur, was so stirred by the Vision that he stood up there and then and vowed that he would go in quest of the Holy Grail. So stirred were the other knights of King Arthur’s Table Round that one hundred and fifty of them rose up and vowed the same vow to go in quest of the Holy Grail, and to see the Cup itself.

An old Hermit, named Nacien, warned them that no man who did not live a clean life would ever achieve this adventure. But King Arthur grieved terribly, because he knew that if one hundred and fifty of his men went forth in this Quest his wonderful fellowship of the Round Table Knights would be broken up forever. He loved to have his sturdy knights around him and to see them go out one by one to rescue distressed damsels or slay some terrible dragon. But never before had so many knights gone out on so hard an adventure. So when they all rode out through the streets of Camelot the people wept and “the King turned away and could not speak for weeping.”

Now Galahad, who went out with them on the Quest, held in his hand his lance and at his side hung his wonderful sword; but he had no shield. After four days he came to a White Abbey and in it hung a shield as white as snow with a red cross in the middle. This shield could only be carried and used by the best knight in the world. A mysterious White Knight who had wounded many who came in quest of the shield gave it to Galahad, saying that it was meant for him and him alone.

After some stirring fights there came to Sir Galahad this splendid adventure. In an old and desolate chapel on a lonely mountain he went quietly to pray, to ask God to give him sound wisdom. And a voice said to him—

“Go thou now, thou adventurous knight, to the Castle of Maidens, and there do away the wicked customs.”

Galahad knew that this was a cursed castle in which much abominable mischief was done. It stood in the valley, by the Severn, and it had deep ditches round three sides. An old man met Sir Galahad, then seven fair maidens, and lastly a knight’s attendant. They all warned him that he would meet with nothing but death at the castle.

Sure enough, seven knights rode out from the Castle of Maidens and set on Galahad all together. He smote the first to the ground with his lance, while the spears of the others broke on Galahad’s white shield. Galahad then let drive at them with his sword with such fury that they fled, while he chased them into the castle and out again. An old man met him with the keys of the castle, and Galahad then set free the prisoners and stopped the wicked customs which those seven knights had set up in the Castle of Maidens.

Sir Galahad went on from one great adventure to another. He rescued distressed maidens from cruel knights. He defended holy men and destroyed wicked customs. His spear and sword and shield were always used on the side of pure life and good fellowship. He never boasted, yet he was the bravest of all knights. Some other knights who were good and brave also did these things. But although they—like Sir Galahad—went out in quest of the Holy Cup, and although they too desired to look on the face of Jesus Himself and learn to give oneself for others, yet they could not achieve this greatest of all adventures. They knew that to see His Face and follow His is the most splendid quest in the world, and the greatest adventure. For the desire for that Vision would lead them, as it must lead any of us, to give up easy slackness and go out into the world, often poor, always with eager faces, to see and to serve men in Britain, or in far and wonderful lands, or even in the Islands of the Sea.

Those knights never saw the Vision. But Galahad did. For he was thrown into prison in a deep hole by a great king, who, when he came to die, was sorry that he had put Galahad into a dungeon. So he sent for him and asked forgiveness, which Galahad gladly gave. When the king died the people of the city chose Galahad king by the assent of them all.

When Galahad had worn the crown for exactly a year he rose up early in the morning to pray, and a Man said to him—

“Come forth, thou servant of Jesus Christ, and thou shalt see what thou hast much desired to see.”

Sir Galahad then saw the Vision of the Holy Grail, the radiant Cup holding the blood which Jesus shed when He gave His life as a perfect Knight in order to save all His people. And the grave knight cried out—

“Lord, I thank Thee, for now I see that that hath been my desire for many a day.”

And the Man said to Sir Galahad, “The Vision has come to you above the other Knights of the Table Round, because you are brave and strong and gentle; but most of all because you have always been pure and clean in your heart and life.”

I

“I will race you to the end of the corridor,” cried young Louis to his brothers, Robert, Alphonso and Philip. “You can start from that pillar, Philip, because you are the youngest.”

So with shouts of laughter and excitement the little princes rushed down the great stone corridors of Poissy Castle. Out of breath they slowly climbed the round stair up to the battlements where the sentries looked out across the river and over the green valley. Louis carried with him a favorite puppy, with which they romped on the wall before clambering down the stair again to go and visit the fierce-looking falcons that stood pruning themselves on their perches in the royal stables.

Louis was twelve years old, a jolly, laughing boy, who yet loved to go into the solemn stillness of the castle chapel and kneel there in prayer. It was the year 1226. When November came, Louis and his brothers with their sister Isabella were in Paris with their mother Blanche.

One day they all started out along the muddy roads in their heavy coach to meet their father, Louis VIII, King of France. As they rolled and rocked along, mists rose from the fields along the way, and the children laughed as now and again red leaves were blown in on to their laps by the gusty autumn wind. But their laughter stopped as they saw another coach coming to meet them. A great bishop got out of the coach, and coming to the Queen-mother with a very sad face, he saluted young Louis as King, and told the children that their father had just died.

Little Louis hardly understood what it all meant, even when he saw his mother—who was usually rather stern and very strong—with her head in her hands, weeping. But he bravely tried from the very first day to be a real king. Before they crowned him as king, however, he was made a knight. Early on the morning when he was to be knighted, he was awakened and led to a bath.

Then he was taken to a great bed on which he lay to show that, to the knight who really fought well and lived purely, there came at last the time to rest.

Again twelve-year-old Louis rose from the bed, and they put on him a snow-white shirt to show that a knight must keep his body pure if he is to win in battle and do great deeds. Over the shirt a crimson robe was placed to tell that, if need be, a knight must pour out his blood “to serve and honor God.” Long trunk hose of a deep brown were drawn on to his legs to speak of the earth whence he came and whither he would go.

A beautiful white girdle was put around him to teach again the purity and self-denial which he must practise. And on his heels were placed two golden spurs. One spur reminded him that he must be speedy and keen in the service of others, while the other spur spoke of the obedience he must give to the will of his God. A spotless white coif was then placed on Louis’ head to show what a stainless soul the gallant and true knight should always have.

Dressed in this way Louis, who was now full of desire to be a valiant young knight, went into the church at Soissons. Being clothed in beautiful new armour—his shield upon his arm, his cuirass on his breast, his steel gloves and gauntlets on his hands and wrists—he knelt there to pray.

Then there was brought to him a shining, naked sword. And he heard these words spoken as the sword was put into his hands.

“Receive this blade in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and use it in defence of yourself and of Holy Church, for the confusion of Christ’s foes and for the Christian faith, and let it wound no man unjustly.”

The old man who repeated these words then stooped down and kissed young Louis on the forehead with the kiss of peace. Then he touched the kneeling boy’s right shoulder with a sword. So Louis rose from his knees, a knight of twelve years old.

The very next day he was crowned King of France in the great cathedral at Rheims. This boy of twelve was led barefoot to the altar on that misty November day. There he promised faithfully that he would do good justice to his people. Walter, the Archbishop of Sens, handed to Louis the sword of justice. Then he put in his right hand the royal sceptre and in his left a small rod with the ivory hand of mercy and justice upon it. Last of all the Archbishop took the glittering crown from the altar and placed it upon Louis’ fair boyish curls.

Few boys in the world have ever taken on their twelve-year-old shoulders such a load in one day. The great barons and knights of France were quarrelling—like brothers—among themselves. They would only unite in order to fight against their King. But Louis had a strong, clever mother who took more of the burden from his shoulders than he ever knew. She gathered trusted friends who were brave and skilful to help her and Louis to govern.

Often young King Louis was beaten by his tutor, who seemed to think that one caning every day was good for a boy whether he had done anything wrong or not. Perhaps it was specially good for a boy-king whom many courtiers tried to spoil in order to become his favorites. Being king and knight and student made him serious as a rule. But people all through his life loved to hear Louis laugh. And he even chuckled at jokes against himself. While a boy he also had many happy walks along the banks of the river Seine, chasing squirrels under the spreading trees of the great woods. Sometimes he would specially enjoy going in a boat right out on the broad, rolling river itself.

II

Louis was now growing tall and slender, and looked a fine young knight, with his graceful body, his light hair and blue “dove’s eyes.” He was so winning that other young fellows loved to be near him. A great friend who saw Louis riding out to battle on a splendid horse, with trumpets sounding, bearing on his fair hair a helmet of steel and in his hand a great two-handed sword, said that he was “the finest knight that ever was seen.”

In the great hall of his castle in the evening the yellow, smoky light of torches and the leaping flames of the great log fire threw strange moving shadows on the tapestry of the walls. Louis, at once Knight and King, sat there in the hall listening to the marvellous stories, which the old warriors told, of how Richard the Lionhearted of England, astride a mighty charger, swung his battle-axe and led his men in the struggle to recover the Holy Land. Louis’ heart was strangely stirred by these stories, told by knights who carried the cross on their armour as a sign that they were Crusaders, and who showed on their tanned and swarthy faces dark scars carved by the shining scimitars of Saladin.

He was so stirred that he determined to lead a Crusade himself. There was a great stir of preparation. The smiths banged on their anvils to make new armour, while horses were shod and saddled to go on the long journey. As the knights bade farewell on leaving for “the glorious journey beyond the seas,” they begged the ladies whom they loved to forgive them for going. And each lady answered——

“Since you would go to serve God, I would not have you remain at home for me. With clasped hands I pray instead that He will give you life and good deeds.”

The knights started on their long journey, joined along the roads by bands of Crusaders, while the women could not forbear to weep. Then Louis, kneeling in the Abbey of St. Denis by the tombs of his father and his grandfather, took the pilgrim’s scarf and staff and walked back to Paris barefoot.

His mother Blanche was a brave woman. Some thought that she was hard. But when she said good-bye to Louis she wept and even fainted.

“Fair son,” she cried, “how can my heart bear this farewell to you? Far rather had I been cut in twain than this, for certainly you have been the best son to me that ever mother bore. Fair son; fair, dear, tender son, my heart knows well that I shall never see you more.”

Then King Louis, all in shining armour, threw himself on his great horse, and amid the shouts of his people and the sound of trumpets, the fluttering of banners and the gleam of a thousand lances, rode out of sight of the straining eyes of his mother.

With those knights and their soldiers Louis rode through the orchards and vineyards of France down to the sea. At Marseilles “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” went aboard the scores of ships that lay waiting in the harbour. When all the pulling and shouting and confusion were over and every one was safely on board, the anchors were weighed and they made sail across the Mediterranean. “And in a little time,” wrote a man who was there, “the wind caught the sails and carried us out of sight of land, so that we saw naught around us but the sky and water, and every day the wind carried us away from the land where we were born.”

At last they came in sight of a long, low, sandy shore, the coast of Africa—the land of Egypt. The ships let down their boats in order to land. Louis was the first to leap from his boat into the water when it was still breast-deep, in order to be in the front of the charge on the enemy. And when his enemies, the dark Bedouin, black Nubian and the swarthy Saracens shook their dripping swords and spears over his head, threatening him with death, he was calm, and unmoved.

Suddenly there was a loud explosion. The Crusaders saw in the air, sweeping towards them, “a tail of fire, big as a barrel of vinegar, long as a great lance, like a dragon flying in the air.”

“The Greek fire!” shouted the soldiers in alarm. For it was that wonderful and deadly fire by which the Saracens swept such destruction among the European soldiers and burned down many castles. King Louis and his soldiers fought on, and sometimes they won, but often they were defeated. For many knights deserted Louis and returned home, while others in mad deeds of courage left gaps in the defences through which the Saracens could pour themselves. At last the King saw that he could not win back the Holy Land, so he returned to France.

III

In his defeat, however, Louis had learned how to strive for and win a more splendid quest than the retaking of Jerusalem. It was the quest of making a more glorious and happy country at home. On his return to Paris bon-fires blazed and bells rang wildly with joy as the King rode through its cobbled streets once more. You would not say that his life was so exciting in France as it had been on the Crusade. Yet his work at home was so wonderful in its quiet power that Louis in the next sixteen years made France the happiest and strongest nation in Europe.

This was his way of spending his days. He did not like the fuss of many valets to dress him, as most kings did. But early in the morning he would leap from his bed, slip on “a coat of camlet, a stuff surcoat without sleeves, a scarf of black taffeta on his shoulders, and a cap with a white peacock’s feather on his well-combed hair,” and go down to kneel in prayer in the royal chapel. Many of the other men would follow in tunics of purple or scarlet, shining belts, with long hose on their legs and long-pointed shoes on their feet. From chapel he went to the gates to give food and money to the poor who came together there. After breakfast he often went to his justice court; or, out in the open air, under a great spreading oak tree on the grass with his courtiers around, he listened while his officers did justice, sometimes stopping them and altering their judgments. He would often make laws to protect the poor people from rough knights and barons.

At dinner again, instead of keeping poorer people at a great distance he always invited some who were miserable and poor, blind and often dirty, to sit at his own table, where he would feed them with his own hands. Often he would carry dishes from the kitchen window to the poor people, holding the dishes in his hat when they were too hot. Sometimes he spilt the gravy into his hat!

In the afternoon he would often find time to play with his children, or with them walk through the woods and watch the boats on the dancing water of the Seine. At supper the knights would draw the heavy table near to the blazing wood fire, and when they had finished eating, would sit there telling tales till it was time for prayers and bed. Louis would laugh joyously at good jokes; but the jokes must be clean, and if they were not he was very angry.

The joy of being a knight was still strong in Louis in spite of all this quiet work-a-day life. So people were not very much surprised when he at last declared that he must go off on another Crusade. He reached the coast of Africa with his sturdy soldiers. It was July. The blazing sun shone fiercely down on the fortress of Tunis where Louis lay, and on the shining tents of the soldiers. Away in the farthest distance snow-tipped mountains spoke of cool, pure winds. Before them the sea glittering in lovely, dancing blueness. But up from the dry, hot sands of the desert there came awful winds, like gusts of hot air from an oven. Fever struck the great heroic Knight and King of the Crusaders. He died.

It was over six hundred years ago. Yet men have always loved to think and read about him more than any other of the great Kings of France. They love to hear of him, not because he was a king, but because, from the day when he—a twelve-year-old boy—was made knight, he did no deed that would make good heroes ashamed of him. He was brave, sometimes madly brave. He was pure and strong; he laughed and revelled in good stories. He was gentle to those who were weak or poor, but very stern to strong men who crushed down others. He did all this because he really loved God as a son loves a father. So he also loved men as his brothers, for they were all sons of the same Father. “He was a very perfect, gentle knight.”

A hundred years ago a little man with black curly hair, a dark face and dressed in black clothes, sat in a room at the India House in London. All day he wrote with a long quill pen in big books and on serious-looking note-paper. Most of the time when he was writing he looked very grave. Indeed, even when he was out visiting people and making jokes, he would look quite serious. For he loved to say rather dreadful things quite solemnly so as to shock people. That is one reason why all boys will like Charles Lamb.

For instance, one day a dear old lady asked him: “How do you like babies, Mr. Lamb?” You should have seen her face when he answered, with his quaint stutter and serious face, “B-b-b-b-boiled, madam.”

When he had finished work for the day at his desk in the India House, he would walk through the streets of London to the home where he lived with his sister Mary. Now the liveliest boy who ever came up to London for the first time and wriggled with excitement as he rode on a ’bus down the Strand and through Trafalgar Square—where the Nelson Monument and the fountains and lions are—never enjoyed those London streets as much as Charles Lamb did. He said that he would not change the dirtiest alley in London for the finest mountains in Scotland. About London he said this—

Did you ask how this black-gaitered little clerk, who could not wield a sword or swing an axe, and who was not strong enough to explore distant countries, comes under the title of a knight? Well, Ernest, some people do not think about him as a hero. They say that he did some things that they would not do. For myself, I reverence him because in some ways he was wonderfully strong, but I love him because he was, in other ways, very weak. And, best of all, he never in all his life “put on side.” One of his ways of shocking people was to make believe he had done worse things than he ever actually did. Listen and judge for yourself whether he was a hero.

When Charles (his friends hardly ever called him “Lamb,” because he said that Christians ought to call each other by Christian names)—when he had walked through the lovely streets of London to his little house, he let himself in at the front door and sat down to tea with his sister Mary. She was ten years older than he. They were the very best chums that brother and sister ever could be. Often they were very happy together and had the best times possible. Over their tea they talked about what they used to do when they were children.

“Do you remember,” Charles would say, “the Temple in the Strand where I lived till I was seven?” (It is not a real temple, but is called The Temple because the Knights Templars who went on Crusades built a beautiful church there.) “You used to take me, Mary, into the round church built by the knights, and inside are their figures carved in stone; lying full length, with their pointed shields, crossed legs and a dog lying under their feet. Then we came out into the sunlight again and played by the fountain where the sparrows splash and wash themselves. From the fountain we looked right down over the gardens, past the great hall, to the King of Rivers. We could see the barges go down the Thames on the tide.”

“Yes,” Mary will have replied, with a laugh, “and do you remember our school in Fetter Lane where you were birched in the day and I went for lessons in the evening?”

“Rather,” answered Charles; “I remember how our legs were wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks where we sat elbowing one another and trying to learn to write pothooks and hangers.”

So they would laugh together as they talked of how Charles afterwards went to Christ’s Hospital School and wore the blue coat and yellow stockings that boys have at that school, where he played at turning nursery rhymes into Latin when he was fourteen.

“There was poor old Aunt Hetty,” said Charles, “the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school, who used to toddle there to bring me good things, when I, schoolboylike, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as we went into the old grammar-school, and open her apron and bring out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me.”

“Ah, but think of the holidays in the country with our great-aunt,” said Mary.

“Yes,” Charles would reply, “I used to be afraid in the evenings in those vast, empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out. Sometimes I walked in the old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless now and then a solitary gardener would cross me.

“How the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit—except now and then. I enjoyed strolling about among the old, melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at. How I loved lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me, or basking in the greenhouse till I could almost fancy myself ripening! Do you remember watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings?”

So Mary and Charles Lamb would talk over their tea, and, when the things were cleared away, they would sit down on opposite sides of the table to set to work on the loveliest of books, the Tales from Shakespeare, which they wrote together for boys and girls to read before they were old enough to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays for themselves.

Towards the beginning of this story I told how they were splendid friends to one another and that often they were very happy together. Often, but not always. When they were not happy, however, it was not through any quarrelling, but because Mary had to be taken away from Charles.

Sometimes a strange look would come into her eyes. When he saw this Charles was deeply troubled. For he knew that this was a sign that Mary was going to be ill—not in her body but in her mind. When her illness came on she did not know what she was saying or doing, and Charles was obliged to take her to some place where she could be specially well attended to and made better again. He loved her so much that when he parted from her at these times of illness he could not stop the tears from flowing down his cheeks. So he would go back to his lonely house to wait, sometimes for months, till she was better.

Now Charles loved a maiden, named Alice, deeply and strongly. And he felt that if he could marry her they would, like the Prince and Princess in the fairy stories, “live happy forever after.” And he might, like his careless, selfish, elder brother, have lived for his own happiness. But he just said to himself, without any boasting about it, “I must live all the time that I can with my sister Mary and care for her.” So he gave up the maiden and all other happiness in order to be the Knight of his sister.

When she was simply ill in her body he would creep around his

But at all times he took care of her, protected her from all the people who would have hurt her, shared all his money with her, and would make the most comical jokes that kept her laughing. When I hear how some gallant knight on a horse charged and drove away an ogre who had captured a beautiful maiden I want to shout and cheer. But when I see Charles Lamb giving up everything to care tenderly for his sister Mary in all her trouble for thirty-five long years, I must stand with bowed head, for I am on holy ground.

In a little village, near a small grey church by a slow, softly-flowing river, there lived, five hundred years ago, a little girl who could run faster than any of the boys. And, as we shall see, she was braver than any boy in the world. The village was called Domremy, in Eastern France, on the banks of the Meuse. The girl, whose name was Joan, had a sweet sunburnt face, a slim, lithe body, and black hair. She loved to sit in the porch, with her sister and her mother, Isabeau d’Arc, listening to stories or learning how to spin, until her father, Jacques, and her three brothers came home from the fields for their evening meal.

When Jacques, who came home very hungry from his work, had eaten his meal, he would tell the mother and children of the dreadful things that were happening in France.

“It was bad enough,” he would say, “in the old days when Edward of England crushed our soldiers at Crecy and Poitiers. But this new English king, Henry, is more terrible as a warrior. Since we lost at Agincourt, and in those years when we lived under our old mad King Charles; yes, and even more now, under his wicked Queen and her foolish son, the Dauphin, France has sunk deeper and deeper. Even the men of Burgundy fight for England against their own land. There is great pity for France.”

As Jacques said these things, and told how cruel the English soldiers were, little Joan’s eyes filled with tears for very pity of the country that she loved. The next day, when the other children were playing, they called out, “Where is Joan, swift-running Joan?” But they could not find her. She had gone away into a lonely place, and was kneeling in the cool, green grass, with some wild flowers at her knees, praying to God to raise up some one to lead her poor country into freedom.

It was midsummer, and Joan was twelve and a half years old. She stood next day in her father’s garden, which was close to the church. A great light shone in the garden, and a Voice spoke to her gently, saying, “Joan, be a good child.” Joan was a little frightened, but she did not tell any one about her Vision and Voice. Some time after the Voice came again, and she saw a Figure, with manly open face and kingly bearing, having wings and a crown, telling her of “the pity that was in heaven for the fair realm of France, and that she must help the King and restore to him his kingdom.”

“Sir,” said little Joan, “I am only a poor girl that cannot even ride, much less lead soldiers on a battle-field.”

“God will help you,” the Figure answered, and faded from her sight.

For four years the Visions and the Voices came to Joan, and at last, when she was sixteen years old, she could not keep quiet any longer, for she felt that God was indeed calling her. So she got an uncle to ask a French commander, Robert de Baudricourt, to take her to the Dauphin to tell him that she would help to save France. Rough Baudricourt said at first that she ought to have her ears boxed and be sent home, but later he was convinced that she was right. Her father was angry, and said that she would bring disgrace on the family by going among rough, rude soldiers.

Joan cut her black hair short, and decided to wear the costume of a boy, a grey doublet and black hose. She rode a horse which was given her—and rode it well from the very beginning. Lastly, she wrote a letter to her father and mother asking them to forgive her for obeying the Voices. Then she started for the castle of Chinon on her black horse.

Joan had never seen such great walls and huge towers and ramparts. But she crossed the swift river Vienne, and—although they kept her waiting for two days—Joan was at length led, in her poor grey clothes, into the brightly-lighted royal hall, where gorgeously dressed ladies and swaggering lords stared at the little peasant girl.

Charles, the Dauphin, had disguised himself, but Joan, though she had never seen him before, went straight to him and said, “The King of Heaven sends you word by me that you shall be crowned at Rheims lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is the King of France.” But for six weeks they delayed, while learned men tried to discover whether she was a sorceress or not. She lost patience at last, saying, “This is not a time to talk, but to act.”

An army was gathered with Joan at the head on her black charger in shining white armour, carrying a banner of white linen with the figure of Jesus embroidered on it. So they marched along the bank of the Loire to Orleans, which was besieged by the English.

Some days after she had entered Orleans with her army, the Maid rose and told the generals that they must attack the English, who had taken a tower across the bridge on the other side of the Loire. They tried to stop her. She replied, “You have been to your Council, and I have been to mine.”

The French army attacked the English in their tower, putting scaling-ladders against the walls. Arrows and shots showered down upon them, while they were thrust from the ladders by lances and axes. After six hours of fighting the men grew weary. An iron bolt from a crossbow wounded Joan above the breast. She wept in pain, and was carried to a meadow, where she was faint. But when some one told her that her troops were about to withdraw, she leapt to her feet, mounted her horse, and cried out—

The men fought like furies. A girl’s clear voice shouted above the hoarse din and clash—

The day was won, and tired, wounded Joan went straight off to bed and to sleep.

By much persuading she made the lazy Dauphin undertake the ride to Rheims to be crowned. Leading eight thousand men, she attacked Jargeau, a town with great walls, stout towers and many cannon, whither the English had gone on fleeing from Orleans. As Joan mounted a ladder with her banner, a stone smote her helmet and knocked her into the moat. But she leapt up, crying, “Friends, friends, come on! come on!” and the town was taken.

Without stopping for rest, she pressed on to Meun and Beaugency, taking both of them, and then attacking the main army of the English, who fled at Patay under the sudden charge of the French. In the evening, as the Maid rode over the battle-field, she saw some French soldier ill-treating a wounded English prisoner. She leapt from the saddle, sat down beside the English soldier, took his head in her lap, and stayed with him till he died.

Soon after these wonderful victories, the Maid’s great hope was realized. Charles was crowned King of France at Rheims, Joan kneeling beside him with her banner and weeping tears of joy.

Seventeen-year-old Joan loved playing with children far better than riding at the head of a victorious army. And the common people followed her with love and devotion. They asked her to touch objects which they brought to her, so that they might become holy. “Touch them yourselves,” she said simply; “your touch will do them as much good as mine.”

The Voices called her to go on with her task. But Charles, who was as great an idiot when crowned King of France as he had been when Dauphin, delayed the army when she urged him to march straight on to Paris. At last she set out without the King, but the English had had time to pour forces into Paris and to strengthen its walls, deepen its ditches and prepare ammunition. The King, half-ashamed, came lagging slowly and uselessly behind.

The Maid led the attack on Paris, passed the first ditch and, amid a sweeping hail of arrows, stood on the edge of the second ditch, calling to her men, when a shaft pierced her thigh. “Come on!” she still shouted to her soldiers in the gathering twilight. The French bugles sounded a retreat, but Joan stayed on till midnight, when the King of France, who had reached the camp, sent soldiers to fetch her back. The next day she was riding against Paris again when the King sent orders to turn back. The Maid was broken-hearted. She laid down her suit of white armour in the old chapel of St. Denis.

Joan, during the next winter, was forced to stay in the Court amid its lazy pleasure-seekers. This she hated above all things. Then she slipped away to the help of Compiègne. She charged out from the town and made the enemy flee before her, but her men lost heart when attacked again from behind, and they fled back into Compiègne. Joan would not retreat, but one of her leaders seized her bridle and led the horse back. Just before they reached the bridge into the town the portcullis was dropped and the drawbridge lifted. Her own traitorous, cowardly people had left Joan to her enemies. The sun was sinking, and its light shone on the flowing banner which Joan carried high. A score of soldiers threw themselves against her, tore her crimson skirt from her, wrenched her from her saddle, and made her prisoner. But she would not surrender. She said—

The Duke of Luxembourg carried her away. He would have sold her to her friends, if her friends would have raised a ransom. But the craven, coward King of France and his foul Court never raised a finger to save Joan or to ransom her from her enemies. From her prison she dropped sixty feet to the ground in an effort to escape. The fall nearly killed her, and she was unconscious for a long time. It was the only time when she had disobeyed her Voices. At length she was handed over to the English. At Rouen she was kept in an iron cage, chained by her neck, hands and feet; the men removing her, when her trial began, to a truckle bed, where they chained her to a wooden beam. The rough soldiers insulted and ill-treated her.

At last she came before the court of theologians for trial—not as a prisoner of war, but as an unbeliever! In vain they tried to entrap her. Her simplicity and honesty were so clear, and her quickness and wit so brilliant, that every now and then even her judges could not help exclaiming, “Well spoken, Joan.”

The monstrous brutes then led her to a vault in the castle and showed her fire, pincers, rack and screws, but the brave Maid, true to her Voices, said, “Even if you tear me limb from limb, I will tell you nothing more.” Her courage in prison was even more wonderful than her daring in battle. She signed with a cross on a paper. She did not know that the writing on the paper said that her Voices were false. When she found this out she was full of sorrow, and said, “I never meant to deny my Voices.”

Now they declared more than ever that she was an unbeliever and must be burned. She moaned, “Alas! am I to be so horribly and cruelly treated, that my body, which is quite pure and uncorrupted, must today be consumed and reduced to ashes.”

She became calmer. At eight o’clock in the morning of May 30, 1430, she was put on a cart in a long white garment. A vast and silent crowd stood awestruck in the market-place, and all the multitude wept to behold her.

Some of the very judges who had condemned her could not bear to stay and see the end. The faggots were lighted, and the flames mounted. Her last thought was for the safety of the man who stood holding the Cross up for her to see. She told him not to stand too near to the flames. Then with a loud cry of Jesus her head fell on her breast.

A noble Englishman left the square crying, “We are lost; we have burnt a saint.” She was nineteen when she died.

Since that day France has never been subject to another king. By the irresistible power of daring courage and flaming faith the Maid had won more wonderful battles than the greatest generals of France. She won them without any magic except that which every one may use—the magic of utter obedience to the Voice that speaks in us all.

“Jolly hard lines,” said Ernest, as he looked down from the hill to a field where a peasant hoed his turnips.

“On whom?” I asked.

“Oh, on the poor wise man, because everybody forgot him, although he’d saved the city.”

“That’s all very well,” I said, “and it was distinctly low down of the people to forget him; but, after all, it was the flying king who had the hardest time of it.”

Ernest wagged his head doubtfully. “The king who attacked the city ought to be ready to take a whacking, but the man who saved it would expect to get praised.”

I agreed, but put the question, “Which would you rather be: the defeated king, or the poor wise man whose cleverness freed the city?”

We agreed that we would rather be the poor man, but that Ernest was right when he said that it was “hard lines” on him. The king got what he deserved, but the poor man did not.

“But people did not forget the knights and heroes you’ve been telling me about,” said Ernest. “They remember all about King Louis and Abraham Lincoln and Joan of Arc.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there are thousands of unknown knights—hidden pilgrims—who do just as good work as the others, yet nobody knows about them. A hero may be like a boy scout—the more he is hidden, the better he does his work.

“Do you remember about the school-boy who was asked ‘What is honour?’ and replied,

That boy was truer than any dictionary. And the real knight, though he likes to have the glory that comes from winning, nevertheless fights first of all not for glory, but to rescue the damsel or slay the dragon. You remember the Lord Mayor’s Show that you saw last autumn, the prancing horses and scarlet cloaks, the clatter of the soldiers’ swords, the sailors pulling the cannon, the blare of brass and the thud of drums, and the Lord Mayor himself in his glittering coach, rolling through the cheering, shouting crowds. Those people in the procession were getting the glory, but the man who is really keeping England alive today is the man you’ve been staring at for the last quarter of an hour.”

“What man? Where? Oh, the chap with the hoe down there,” pointing to the turnip-hoeing peasant who was then resting. “Well, he doesn’t look a very lively knight.”

I could only quote—

“No, he isn’t a lively knight, but ‘on his back’ is ‘the burden of the world.’ He is making turnips grow while some people can only consume apples.”

Ernest’s hand went to his bulging pockets.

“His soil-stained clothes and chalky boots would be scorned in many rich homes; but those very homes are built and supported by the work of such men as this labourer with his hoe, who does his slow pilgrimage between the rows of turnips. He feeds us and he rears sturdy boys. Nor can we ever cease to reverence men who work with hoe or spade, with saw or plane, creating good things for their fellow men, when we remember that the Hero of all heroes Himself worked as a Carpenter in the workshop at Nazareth.

“Do you know, as I watch that man with the hoe, and dream, I see a long procession of hidden pilgrims whose names no man knows, and whom no man can number.”

“On a rock-bound coast some men land from a small sailing ship. They climb through a winding defile into the land of Greece. They have left home and their own cities in Asia Minor to carry a great message of good news. They will never come back again.

“The ship puts out again and sails up the Mediterranean towards the setting sun, sweeping through the Straits of Messina and then running north to Rome. There we see girls who refuse to enter the heathen temples as Vestal virgins. They are questioned by stern judges, and confess that they have forsaken the gods of Rome, and worship one God through Jesus. Soon they stand on parched sand in a hideous ring of ten thousand excited faces. A shout goes up from the vast crowd around the Coliseum. There is a signal. Iron gates swing open with a clang. Hungry lions leap out toward those maidens.

“Another ship sails up the Adriatic to Venice, and an eager band of nameless pilgrims marches over the frozen passes of the Alps into Northern Europe. They meet barbarous warriors clothed in skins, shaking their matted manes and waving spears as their wild shouts ring through the forest. The hidden pilgrims are carrying the Message to these Goths. Some of them accept the new Way. The other Goths, infuriated, burn their houses and tents to the ground, leaving them homeless and defenceless.

“Still another ship sails from Northern Europe into the fogs of a narrow sea bearing men who land on a shelving coast. They settle in the kingdom of Kent and walk westward along these hills on which we are now seated. Some were thrown into pits and others were slain. Their names are not known. But just because they came fourteen hundred years ago, the Glory of the Quest comes to us two here on this high Way where those hidden pilgrims walked.

“Hundreds of years pass, and another ship puts out from the west of these northern islands and sails into the sunset for weeks carrying pilgrims to a new land. In the depths of those American forests, ringed in a cruel cage of copper-faces, men are burned and have their nails torn from their fingers. And today in lumber-shack or mining-camp hidden pilgrims, men with rough hands to grip pick and axe, live ‘straight’ because they care for the Quest.

“Again, see a street in Edinburgh and children run swiftly over the pavements in their play. It is night. Here is a hidden pilgrim.

“I see a room in London. A man just home from China is talking to me. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we were obliged to fly for our lives when the Boxer outbreak came. They surrounded us with waving swords and bludgeons. My boy who was twelve years old, was running about without any sense of fear and in the thick of the melee. He called to me, “Father, isn’t this like one of Henty’s novels.” It was. Look here.’ And the missionary bent his head so that I could see a great dint in his skull. ‘That was from a blow with a Boxer sword,’ he said. ‘My pith helmet broke the stroke, or I should not be here today. The real heroes of that day,’ he continued, ‘were our Chinese Christians, who were cut down and shot rather than give up the service of Jesus.’

As Ernest and I rose to leave the hill, the sun slowly sank behind the lion-mass of Leith Hill amid a piled-up City of Golden Cloud. Shafts of fiery light struck like swords into the arc of the sky and blazed along the Pilgrims’ Way. The bushes burned like torches in the glow of the sun. Then we saw as it were a Holy City. “And the street of the City was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.” Towards it there marched from every side an innumerable host of the hidden pilgrims of the Cross. They came from the East and the West. In the dark valleys they bore torches to give light for the steps of the children. But as they neared the gates their torchlight was caught into the Glory that did lighten the City. And the gates were never shut. In the World the pilgrims were hidden, nameless and forgotten. In the City they found their names written in letters of gold in the Book of the King.

Such a Fisher stood on the shore of a great lake, large enough to be called a sea. He was girt in his fisher’s linen coat. He had dark flashing eyes and crisp black hair, a sunburnt face, tanned with the sting of the breezes, and strong legs planted firmly on the sloping sea-shore.

As he looked out over the Lake, Simon the Fisher saw first one and then another brother fisherman put out his boat and hoist a small sail. After the little ships had gone out into the deeper water they let down nets, drawing them up from time to time, when they threw into the ship the flapping silvery fish that were caught.

Simon, who was looking up the Lake towards a gap in the mountains, watched the sky anxiously. Then he saw a white scud of foam sweeping over the water at the end of the Lake. There could be only one thing to do. He put his hands together round his mouth and shouted some words to the men in the ships. Hastily they swung their nets aboard and put into the little bay just in time to escape the sudden squall that lashed the water into a confused fury of waves.

“Well, Simon,” James, one of the young fishermen, would say; “you saved us that time.”

“Ay, and thank you for it, my lad,” old Zebedee would remark. “Simon has a quick eye—and a quick temper,” he would add with a smile. “Simon is like the storm that has just swept down the Lake. You think all is quiet, then he rages and roars, yet in a few moments he is as still as yon Lake has become again. Now, lads, let us get back to the fishing.”

Simon would turn after such a happening and join his quieter brother Andrew in mending the nets ready for their own fishing. Then they, too, put out a short distance from the shore and threw their nets into the sea. As they did this a young Man, about their own age, thirty years, walked by the sea. And He greeted them with a smile. They had met Him before. He had already made them feel that He was unlike any one whom they had ever known.

For only a short time before they had been listening to their great preacher, John, who had stirred their blood as they stood on the banks of the river. And this other young Man from their own district of Galilee, whom they had heard of as a carpenter, had also come to hear John. But when John, who had poured blazing scorn on the great people of the land, saw this young carpenter, he said, “Behold one whose sandals I am not worthy to carry.” That was how the very Face of Jesus always impressed active and healthy young people, especially young men and boys.

His words, too, were so full of wisdom, and His Face looked on them with such love that they could not help loving His in return.

“Simon, Andrew,” said Jesus, as they looked up; “come after me.” Then with a wave of His hand towards the nets, “Follow Me, I will make you fishers of men.”

Across the blue waters of the Lake, Simon saw the bright crags and yellow limestone glowing in the sun, while, all up and down the lake, the water was dotted with fisher boats skimming along before the breeze or hanging still with bare masts over their nets. Behind lay the little village called Fisherhome (Bethsaida), a hamlet of the larger town of Capernaum.

This was the home where Simon had run to and fro ever since he was a baby. Under those olive trees he had played; those dark green fig trees had fed him and given him shade when he was tired with his play. Those smooth and spreading walnut trees had been a tent for him when he played at being Bedouins, as we do at being Indians. From those spreading vineyards he had been given most luscious grapes. He was in the most fruitful spot in all the country; the tiny corner which was called “The Garden of Princes.”

Here as a boy he had raced along the sands and shouted as his father came back from the day’s fishing. And on a proud day he had first climbed over the edge of his father’s fishing boat and gone out with him on to the wonderful Lake itself.

Now, however, Simon was a young man. The Voice had spoken. “Simon, follow Me.” Simon was quick-tempered—so his friends had found him. But he was just as impetuous in his fine daring when doing strong, good deeds, as in his sudden outbursts of anger.

Without hesitating he rose, pulled his nets into the ship, and climbed over its side. Andrew came with him, for it was Andrew who had first brought Jesus and Simon together and had first understood that Jesus was a great Leader. So Simon climbed the rocky roads with Jesus and walked through the white, sunny villages of his native land with his Hero. Often they walked up the mountain-side, and there under the blue sky, on the grass of the hill near the shade of the olive trees, with Jesus seated on some boulder, they rested and listened to His wonderful message.

There was one great day when Simon took Jesus to his own little stone cottage home. His wife’s mother was ill, but Jesus went in and taking her by the hand healed her, so that she could get up and help—as she loved to do—in the work of the house.

When Simon was fond of anybody he always loved them very much. Now he had learned to love and reverence Jesus more than any one else in the whole wide world. Like all really strong people, he often felt himself to be very weak. There was, for instance, one lovely morning on the Lake of Galilee, when Jesus had helped Simon, in the fresh companionship of dawn, to catch his fish. Something in the radiant strength of Jesus had overcome Simon, and he called out, “Go from me, for I am a sinful man;” just as every boy when he has met his greatest friend and hero after doing some low-down thing, has said,—perhaps only to himself, “I am a beast.”

Simon had a great deal of the boy in him, as you will see. For one thing he was always rushing into a dangerous act with fine daring, and then finding his courage ooze out of his fingertips.

One night he saw his Hero walking upon the waves of Galilee, to come to His disciples, who were in a boat. He walked on

Simon, with a dazzling daring and a splendid faith, leapt over the edge of the boat and for a moment his courage was equal to the need. He stood on the water, but his daring failed, and he cried out, “Lord, save me,” as he threw up his arms, and Jesus stooped to lift him out of the waters that would have swallowed him up.

It was the same quick Simon who climbed with the tiny group of friends over the tufted grass and the strewn boulders of the Mount to the top. There such a radiant glory of light shone round their Hero and Master, that Simon called out—

“Oh, it is good to be here. Let us camp out on this mountain together.”

But Jesus knew that there was a boy in the valley below who was very ill. So He led Simon down and healed the boy, to show that mountaintop holy-days are good just because they do come to an end and make us more fit to do good things in the valley afterward.

After this Simon and the other friends of Jesus went quite a long walk northward over rocky roads and between great hills where robbers lived. At last they came to a place that was on the edge of the country of the barbarian peoples. And as they stood there at Caeserea Philippi, Jesus asked them who they thought He was. Impetuous Simon called out quickly—

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus was especially rejoiced at Simon knowing and saying this without being told, and saying it just at the time when people in the City were declaring that He was a traitor and ought to be killed.

“Simon,” He said, “you shall be called a Rock” (i. e. Peter) “and on this Rock I will build.”

Simon Peter was very proud of this splendid nickname, and always liked to be called by it. But only a few minutes after it had been given to him, he, in his foolish hot-headedness, tried to stop Jesus from doing what He knew was His work. Peter did it because he loved Jesus and wanted to keep Him alive, but it was a mistake; and Jesus was obliged to be very stern with Peter and say, “Get behind me, Tempter.”

Then there came the last evening on which the friends were all to be together. They sat at supper in an upper room, And Jesus, to show His disciples what kind of life they ought to live, took a basin of water and a towel and began to wash their feet. But when it came to impetuous Peter’s turn he jumped up and said, “No, Lord, you must never wash my feet.” But Jesus said that only thus could he learn and be clean. Peter rushed to the other extreme, and said, “Then not my feet only but my hands and my head.”

It was a very short time after this, later the same evening in a garden near Jerusalem, that Jesus stood with His friends at night. They saw torches coming nearer and nearer, and heard the sound of voices murmuring and the crackling of twigs as people walked toward them. At last the group of people got quite close to them. They had come to capture Jesus, and they came at night-time, because they were afraid of the crowds who were about in the day-time who loved Jesus and would want to stop them from taking Him.

Peter was fiercely angry with them. He lifted a sword which he was carrying, and though he was only one against a crowd, he smote wildly at the first man he saw. The blow struck off the man’s ear. Jesus, without blaming Peter, touched the man’s wound and healed it. Peter could dare a multitude when his passion was aroused. But he was—like us all—afraid of being sneered and laughed at. Only a few hours later, when Jesus had been led off to the high priest’s house, Peter was standing in the courtyard. He warmed his hands at an open brazier, a fire that stood there. A servant-maid came along and hearing the soft Galilean burr in Peter’s speech, said, pointing to Peter with her finger and waving her other hand in the direction of the hall where Jesus waited for the hour of His trial, “This fellow was also with Him.”

Peter started and flushed under his tanned skin. Jesus was being sneered at as a traitor. Suspicious eyes were watching Peter himself, and Jesus would very likely be killed, nailed to a Roman gallows. Why should Peter die too? And he fiercely denied again and again that he knew anything about Jesus.

The first streaks of dawn crept into the Eastern skies. Jesus walked slowly through the courtyard on His way to His death. And He turned and looked upon Peter, Peter so daring with his sword only an hour or two ago, now afraid to own to a servant that he ever knew Jesus. “I never knew the Man,” Peter had just shouted. The cock crew to herald a new day. But the day was bitter, bitter night for Peter. Peter—the Rock! Only on that last day he had boasted like a boy, “Though everybody else runs away from You, I will not.” Peter went out under the waning stars and wept bitterly.

The next day Peter walked up a Hill near the City. There, between two thieves, he saw the Heroic Master, with whom he had walked about these hills for three glorious years, nailed to a Roman gallows. And the last words that that Friend had heard from Peter’s lips were, “I never knew the Man.” Peter thought he would never have the chance to put it right again.

What is this incredible news? Jesus Christ is risen! It cannot be. But the bare possibility is enough. Peter races down the paths, the wind rushing through his hair, careless of stones, leaping over obstacles. He reaches the tomb. It is empty. He cannot bear the suspense. He must do something. “Look here,” he says to his companions, “I’m going fishing.”

All through the night he toils till his arms ache and his back is weary, trying to forget his sorrow. Early in the morning they draw near to the shore. The dawn begins. From the hills there comes the faint, distant sound of a cock crowing. Peter shudders at the remembrance.

Look, what is that dim Figure on the shore, clothed in the mist of the morning. It cannot be. It is. And Peter, with all his old impetuous spirit, hurls himself over the edge of the ship, and plunges through the water. Dripping, breathless, he drops at his Master’s feet. “Do you love Me?” comes the question from Jesus, and vehemently Peter cries out that he does love Him. “Am I very dear to you?” asks Christ. “Master, You know that I love You.”

“Feed My sheep, My lambs,” comes the glorious order. The traitor is made shepherd.

Peter the Fisherman had always been a daring, impetuous boy and man. Now he grew far more daring and courageous, and never denied his Master. It was he who first boldly stood before many thousands of people to tell the story of his Master’s life and death. His pluck and determination carried him over mountain and river, through floods and across seas, to face robbers and kings with equal composure on his Shepherd Quest—to feed His lambs.

At last when the hair of the young fisherman had gone grey in the great work, the Romans took him prisoner to crucify him as his Master had been crucified. Peter’s mind flashed back to that day when, afraid of being crucified, he had shouted, “I know not the Man.” So he said now, “I am not worthy to be crucified as my Master was. Crucify me head downward.” And they did.

Among the Knights of the Splendid Quest this Hero stands high. He ranks nobly in

Splash! Dorothy dived into the quiet Yorkshire lake. Her lithe little body slipped through the water like some silvery fish as she swam swiftly across to the further bank.

“I’ll race you back,” shouted her brother, as he dropped into the water. Away they sped, swimming with all their might. At first he seemed to be gaining; then she drew nearer to him; and at last, just as they got to the edge, with one last spurt Dorothy touched the bank first.

Later in the day Dorothy Pattison would ride her frisky pony up to the moors near her village home in Hanxwell. She would row with the boys in their sculling-boat, and in the winter-time she revelled in flying round and round the lake on her skates, with her mane flying in the wind, till the colour glowed in her cheeks.

She was a girl who could beat a good many boys at these sports, yet she loved her dolls even more than most girls do. She especially enjoyed playing “Let’s pretend” that the dolls were ill and she was the nurse. She would give them physic from little bottles and bandage up their heads and arms and legs.

“When I grow up,” she said to her sister in those talks that all boys and girls have when they are supposed to be asleep in bed—“when I grow up I’ll be a nurse or a lady doctor and do simply everything for my patients.”

One day they were told to go about the house very quietly and not make any noise, because Dorothy’s sister was ill in bed.

“Let me sit up and nurse her,” said Dora, who—beside wanting to nurse her sister—was not keener on going off to bed than other girls or boys. Her father and mother thought that it would be too much for her. But she somehow succeeded in getting quietly into the room, and she seated herself by the side of the bed. Having started, she was allowed to go on. Her nursing was so soothing and clever—of course with the help of her mother—that her sister soon got quite well, and they could go out to play with the boys again.

When Dorothy was two years older a fever spread through the village. Now she used to go to visit an old woman in a cottage in this village, and they were very close friends. One day Dorothy heard that the old woman was ill with the fever. She ran down the village street, in at the garden gate and opened the cottage door. She found that the poor old dame had been left all alone, though she was very ill.

Dorothy did not hesitate for a second. She hung up her coat behind the door and said—

“I have come to stay with you.” Then she made herself very busy getting nice tasty bits of food cooked and making everything look cosy and clean. This made the old soul feel happier.

Then Dora, who had been too busy to think of anything except her work, began to wonder whatever her father would say to her. But she thought it would be very cowardly and cruel to leave the old woman alone, so she got a little boy to run up to her home at the rectory to say that she was with the old woman who was ill, and that she was going to stay the night. Her father said, “Very well, as she has made up her mind to stay without asking permission, she must stay on now to nurse the old woman whether she wants to or not.”

She bravely went on doing everything like a nurse—washing and feeding her, giving her medicine and reading to her. But the old woman got worse and then died, and poor Dorothy—who had been full of courage—was dreadfully frightened as she sat there through the night all alone.

She sent another boy up to her father to say that she wanted to come home. He sent back the message, “Stay where you are till you are sent for,” which would sound very cruel. But, as a matter of fact, very quickly a carriage came with her old nurse, and Dorothy was driven off to the seaside to have all the fever infection blown away by the salt breezes.

Dorothy grew up to be taller and stronger than most girls. She seemed always ready to see the comical things, and would laugh and sing all over the house. When she was out walking on the great moor, with the purple heather under her feet and the strong winds blowing her hair about her face, she felt like shouting for joy. Then she would walk rapidly back and nurse her mother who was ill. At last her mother died and Dorothy went out to teach at the village school at Woolston, Buckinghamshire, where she lived in a very little cottage, and all the boys and girls got very fond of her.

You remember, however, that when quite a girl she had found out what her Quest was to be—she was to be a nurse.

So she joined a Sisterhood of women who were called the Good Samaritans because they loved to rescue and help people who were ill. They went into the towns to work among people who were having a bad time, and to cheer and heal them. Dorothy had to do all the work of the house where she was staying. She would go down on her hands and knees to scrub floors and polish grates. She swept and dusted, while sometimes she cooked. She also learned a great deal more about nursing.

Dorothy had lived all her young days in the country among green trees and fields and singing birds. Now she went into a town where great chimneys sent out columns of black smoke that covered the trees in grime, while only the soot-covered sparrows chirped. Great wheels went round at the mouth of deep, dark coal-pits, while at night the sky glowed a murky red with the glow of the furnaces.

The town is called Walsall, and Dorothy, or Sister Dora, as they now named her, went into a quite small cottage hospital.

The surgeon thought that she was a wonderfully quick and clever nurse, so that when a bigger hospital was built on the very top of the hill where Walsall stands, she took charge of it.

She was so jolly and told such comical tales that even boys almost wanted to have a broken leg or something of that sort so that she could nurse them. She played games with them, like draughts and dominoes, and when they heard her laugh it made them forget all their pain. But if she heard two boys quarrelling or a man using bad words, then her mouth would go quite stern and she would stop them very firmly. They really liked her for telling them that they were wrong. Generally when people come out of hospital they are glad to forget all about it. But they loved her so much that after they had gone away for some time a message would come up—“Please, Sister Dora, John Nightingale (or some other name) has called and would like to see you.”

Very often when she had been hard at work nursing all day, and had at last got off to bed and to a restful sleep, there would come a ring at the hospital gate. She would not want to get up, but she would overcome her sleepiness, go down and find that some drunken men had been fighting and cutting one anothers’ heads. She would dress their wounds very gently and then give them a very straight talking to.

“I have been at work nursing all day,” she would say, “and now, when the time comes to rest, you go fighting like beasts in the street, and then come in the middle of the night for me to mend your broken heads.”

They were ashamed of themselves.

Here is a story which shows that she was braver than most men. I will just give the story as Mrs. Creighton, who knew Sister Dora, tells it in a beautiful little book called Some Famous Women.

One night a fine healthy young man was brought in with his arm torn and twisted by a machine. The doctor said that nothing could save it, and that he must cut it off at once. Sister Dora was moved by the despair of the poor man; she looked long at his arm and at himself, and the man cried out, “Oh, Sister! save my arm for me; it’s my right arm.” When she turned to the doctor and asked if she might try to save the arm, he only asked her if she was mad, and said that the man’s life could not be saved unless his arm were taken off at once. But she turned to the patient and said, “Are you willing for me to try to save your arm, my man?” He was willing, but the surgeon was very angry, and refused to help her, saying, “Remember, it’s your arm,” and telling her she must take all the responsibility. Night and day for three weeks she tended him, naturally feeling terribly anxious as to what would happen. She often said afterwards, “How I prayed over that arm.” At the end of that time she asked the surgeon to come and look at her work, and when she unbandaged the arm and showed it to him, straightened and in a healthy, promising condition, he exclaimed, “Why, you have saved it, and it will be a useful arm to him for many a long year.” It is not surprising that Sister Dora wept with joy at her success, nor that the man became one of her most devoted admirers. He was nicknamed “Sister’s Arm” in the hospital, and used to come back often to see her after he had left.

It was dreadfully difficult to get Sister Dora to go away for holidays, because she loved her work so much. And even when they subscribed a lot of money and bought her a little carriage and a pony, she used it for sending the people who were getting better out for drives in the country. But when she did take a holiday she enjoyed it enormously. She bathed or skated, climbed over fences, crawled through hedges, walked across streams of water, marched over the moors and down the hills; leading the way and going on till even the boys, whose muscles were strong with plenty of cricket and football, were tired out.

Then there came a year of terrible strain. Month after month she spent fighting an epidemic of small-pox practically alone in an isolation hospital. Then in the autumn an awful explosion at some iron-works covered eleven men with fiery molten metal. They hurled themselves into the canal to escape their agony, and were rescued and driven to the hospital. The doctors were almost obliged to leave the ward, the scene was so dreadful. But Sister Dora, surrounded by cries of “Oh, come and dress me,” worked rapidly trying to ease their pain. For nearly a fortnight she never once went to bed. Yet she was all the time going from bed to bed, smiling, telling tales and drawing the men’s attention from their pain. Only two of them lived, but one of these said, “It did you good only to look at her. What we felt for her I couldn’t tell you; my tongue won’t say it.”

At last Sister Dora began to feel that something was the matter with herself. She told a surgeon, and he said that she had a disease from which she could never get better. But she forbade him to tell anybody, and just when on with her work, laughing and joking and making people well. At last she could not go on any longer. A little house was taken for her. And just as the bells were going to ring in Christmas Day—the birthday of the Great Healer Whom she loved and served—Sister Dora died.

Nearly everybody in the town went to her funeral; boys who had been cured by her, workmen who took off their caps and could not stop the tears from rolling down their faces, mothers whose children were alive and happy because Sister Dora had nursed them.

The workmen went away then and clubbed together to give their hard-earned money to make a lovely statue, which is placed in the centre of the town. There stands Sister Dora in her nurse’s apron, and a roll of lint-bandage in her hands, while her gentle eyes and her quiet, firm mouth, with just a twinkle of fun at the corners, remind the men of today—they were the boys whom she healed—of that bravest heroine and tenderest healer, who gave her life to save them.

Three boys thrust a tarred herring-box into the sea from a sandy shore between two rocky points up the narrow Loch Fyne, on the rugged west coast of Scotland.

“Look at James,” shouted one to his companion as the third boy leapt out into the box. For a few moments he swayed and rolled in his perilous position as the box swung out from the shore.

The boys began to tow him and his box through the sea, laughing as they walked along the shore pulling at the cord. Snap! The cord had broken and they fell on their faces on the sand, still laughing. But when they stood up again their smiles died from their faces. James was being carried out to sea—in a herring-box.

They shouted, and he vainly tried to pull to the shore with his hands as paddles. Then there came an answering shout from the little fishing village of Ardrishaig. A man came running down the beach in his great wading-boots. But the tide was carrying the boy swiftly away, and his herring-box was surely filling with water.

Swiftly the fisherman strode to his boat, which hung near the edge of the water. Taking an oar, and giving another to the two boys who followed, he pulled out in pursuit. They reached James just as his box was filling with water and sinking with the boy’s weight. They rescued him, and he went home to the slate cottage where he lived, to be thrashed by his mother for nearly drowning himself.

This boy, James Chalmers, was passionately fond of the sea. He was happy if he could only get into a boat or on to a log or plank of wood. Three times he was carried home for drowned, but revived again. The more dangerous was the position he was in, the more he loved it.

When James was ten years old he lived up at the narrow end of Loch Fyne, where the River Aray came rushing, tumbling and roaring down to pour into the sea. Standing on the bank he saw a schoolmate come rolling down in the water, drowning. Rushing to the wooden bridge, James threw off his coat and jumped into the water, seizing the boy’s dress as the water swept him by. He then slipped down the river a little, holding the boy in one arm, seized a branch, dragging the boy to the bank, whence he was lifted by friends. A few years later he was standing on a quay when a child fell into the water and was carried down with the current. Running along the bank he threw off his coat, sprang into the water, swam to the child and brought it back to the weeping mother.

A short time after this, when young James Chalmers was in Sunday-school, his minister took a copy of a magazine from his pocket and read a letter from a missionary in Fiji. It spoke of cannibalism and the lives of savages. It told how the power of the life and teaching of Jesus made them stop killing and eating one another and start to live clean, strong lives.

The old man, when he had finished reading, looked out over his spectacles and said, “I wonder if there is a boy here who will by and by bring the Gospel to cannibals.” And young James in his heart said, “I will.”

James forgot about this very soon. He became one of the most powerful skaters and swimmers in the district, and a strong football player. Then one day, while he was listening to a man speaking from a platform, he remembered his old vow to go out to the cannibals. He made up his mind to do it. So he went to Cheshunt College to learn the things that would make him able to face the difficult work.

He often played jokes on the students there. Once, for instance, they were sitting in the great hall at their evening meal when the great door opened and in shambled a large, brown bear, sending out the most awful growls! The bear rushed up to one of the students and began to hug him. There was a struggle, and they discovered that it was James Chalmers in a skin he had borrowed. Often he went out on the New River on a raft he made—for he went on the water wherever he was, and whenever he could find time. And once he had to jump into the River Lea and save the life of a student who could not swim.

At last, in 1866, the great day came for young Chalmers to sail for the distant islands of the sea. He got on board the John Williams, and sailed for weeks and weeks, till at last they sighted an island which Captain Cook had called Savage Island when he first discovered it. But when Chalmers went there it was called Niuè, because the people had learned from Christ not to be savages.

It is a lovely island, surrounded by a long coral reef just under the water. The great rolling breakers of the Pacific come grandly in, rise some twenty feet high, curl over and crash with the roar of thunder over the reef. Outside the reef the sea is thousands of fathoms deep, the bottom being far beyond the reach of any anchor. Night was falling. After a strong wind that had raised a rolling sea it fell calm. The surge and swell of the Pacific set toward the reef. Three boats were dropped and attempted to keep the John Williams out at sea. At ten o’clock the white surf beating upon the hidden cruel reef could be seen through the dense darkness. The passengers crowded into the boats. In a few moments they heard a fearful crash as the ship was lifted on to the reef and furiously battered by the waves.

This would have been enough for most men. But Chalmers was always full of joy when in danger, and especially on the sea.

“During our stay on this island” (he writes) “I nearly lost my life. I was greatly interested in the surf swimming, and often watched the native lads at it. One day the sea was particularly big, and I determined whilst bathing to try and run in on a sea with a plank. I got too far out and was sucked back to the big boulders, and, the seas washing me about, I got much bruised and cut. I can remember feeling that all was lost, when a great sea caught me and threw me on to a boulder, and I felt now or never, and with a terrible effort I clung to it, and then rising, gave one spring, and landed where help could come to me. I was picked up and carried to the house. I was in bed for several days.”

From the island of Niuè, Chalmers went to the island of Rarotonga, where he was to work as a missionary for the next ten years. As the splendid missionary ship John Williams was wrecked, he sailed in the only ship at hand. It belonged to a noted pirate named Bully Hayes, a desperado who cared for nobody. You would not expect him to like a missionary. But in young James Chalmers he found a man who was even more daring than himself. For Chalmers risked his life as a missionary of Jesus Christ in more adventures on sea and land, up river-creeks and in swamps, than ever did Bully Hayes for his own selfish plunder. So this fierce pirate in a very few days learned to admire Chalmers more than anybody else. And he said when Chalmers left him, “If only you were near me, I should certainly become a new man and lead a different life.”

As they landed on Rarotonga a native who was helping them ashore asked, “What fellow name belong you?” He answered, “Chalmers.” The native shouted the nearest word he could: “Tamate.” The name “Tamate” was, from that moment, the only one that the natives used during the whole of his life.

On that lovely island in the Pacific Ocean he gained a wonderful power over the native people. His word became their law. He fought their drinking customs, and even had the king of the island tried and fined for being drunk. He did all this not by force, but by the power of his courage and will, and because they knew that he did it for their good. But he became most terribly angry with the white men—the Englishmen—who in spite of the laws landed strong drink at night on the shore to make money for themselves out of the ruin of the people.

After ten years Chalmers was called to the work that he most of all wanted to do. New Guinea—which is now called Papua—is the largest island in the world. The fierce inhabitants are often cannibals, whose great sport is head-hunting. In some of their villages thousands of human heads may be found. The greatest man was the chief who could claim most skulls, and the young man was admired who wore a human jaw-bone on his arm to show he had killed a man. They are finely-built men who wear nose-sticks, earrings, necklaces, feathers, tattooing and paint, but no clothes. They often live in houses on stilts—wood houses built on the stems of trees driven into the bottom of a lake. All their weapons and tools are of stone and wood, for they do not know how to make iron.

Where no white man has been they have no idea of a God of love, but only of angry spirits who fly about in the night killing people and spoiling their homes.

To thousands of these savages Chalmers was the first white man that they had ever seen. They admired his strong nose especially, and ran away when he began to take off his boots. They thought he was taking himself to pieces. Nearly every week of his twenty years there he was in danger of his life. For he was never satisfied to stay among the savages whom he knew, but would go exploring in rivers and creeks where no European had ever been before.

They would meet him as he approached a village, shaking their spears and clubs and holding their bows and arrows ready to shoot. A single glimmer of fear on his face would have meant death, certain and immediate. But he would hold up one hand in the air to show he had no fighting weapons, and would smile and laugh on them all, calling out their word for peace.

His power over them was wonderful. He went, for instance, to a very fierce tribe of savages whose whole life was occupied in plundering and killing weaker tribes. When he got there he went straight to the chief and said—

“You must not again go to Kabadi, and all along the coast we must have peace.” That simply meant they must give up the whole work of their lives. They could have killed him easily, for they had great clubs in their hands. But when he looked at them they simply said, “Yes, you are right, we will not go.” And they did not ever go again. So he made peace where there had been unending war, and life where there had been one long story of horrible death.

His work was not simply in preaching or singing hymns. His work was, as he said, “done in bush-clearing, fencing, planting, house-building, and many other forms of work, through fun, play, feasting, travelling, joking, laughing.” Yet he did much good, for instance, by just teaching the savages hymns which they could not understand at first. But they loved to sing, and gradually the words struck into their hearts and minds.

Imagine, for instance, Chalmers in the moonlight on Lawes Bay, and then going round by Free Point into Farm Bay. Before them lay a great rolling line of mountains. Nearer was the clear line of the coast, with the white surf breaking upon it in the bright light of the moon. On each side of Chalmer’s boat was a large war-canoe manned by savages. These wild, brown, naked men, who had spent their lives slaying their brothers, were singing “Come to Jesus” and “I have a Father in the promised land.” He lived in the houses of these men, slept with them around him, and ate out of the same dish.

Sometimes while walking through a village with savages in it some strange power would make him suddenly turn round just in time to wrench from the hand of a savage a club that was just being held up ready to crush his skull. There was a Power greater than even his own daring.

A great chief told him in after years that again and again he and his fellow-savages had made up their minds to murder him and his wife. They had set apart some of their fiercest men to do the deed. The men had walked again and again to the low fence round the rough log house where Tamate and his wife lay, unarmed and asleep. The savages knew that, if they killed him, all the other cannibals would call them great heroes. Yet as they started to climb the fence some mysterious hand seemed to hold them back. It was God protecting the hero and heroine who were ready to lay down their lives for Him.

What, then, do we think of the way in which Mrs. Chalmers lived alone in her mission-house when her husband was away—often for weeks—seeking some new tribes. She was surrounded by cannibals who wanted her chair and clothes, and the other things in her home, and who would think her a choice dainty in their cannibal feast. Hers was a quiet heroism which would have taxed even his daring.

So in shipwreck and peril, through fever and loss, through swamp and up river and creek he passed for over a score of years, facing death daily without boasting, yet with a joy in the peril. He could face a village of howling savages, yet he would patiently teach a school of brown infants. With his flashing eyes, his trumpet voice, his splendid shock of grey hair, his broad shoulders and strong hands, he was truly—as Robert Louis Stevenson called him—“the Greatheart of New Guinea.”

At last a day came when, sick and ill with fever, soon after his wife had died, he saw a great crowd of natives come off in canoes and crowd the decks of his boat, the Niuè, till there was no room to move. The canoes were filled with bows and arrows, clubs, bamboo knives and spears. The savages refused to leave the Niuè, so Chalmers decided to go on shore in the whale-boat. Half of the natives followed him. A friend, another missionary, named Tomkins, whose mother is still alive in England, would insist on going with him. It was April 8, 1901. They were never seen again. They entered one of the “long houses” built by the savages. At a signal both of them were knocked on the head from behind with stone clubs. Their heads were cut off and their bodies eaten.

It was terrible, but Chalmers had faced it a thousand times. It was horrible, yet it was a glorious crown of martyrdom to the pathfinder of Papua, who had led men all his life out of hideous savagery into purity and light.

Here is the glorious claim that he made some years before he died—

The Greatheart that he was!

Three men strode along a narrow path in a green valley between great hills. Behind them came a little band of followers. Over their left shoulders they could see the sun gradually dropping behind the range of rolling, purple hills. On their backs they carried enormous round skin-covered baskets, as large as themselves. Some water weeds hung limply from the bottom of the basket-boats. These coracles had carried Columba, Canice and Comgall with their friends across the lake that lay behind them. The three had then slung the coracles over their shoulders till they should reach the next lake, the gleam of whose grey waters they could now see before them.

At the lake side, where the tumbling waters of the mountain stream splashed their way down to lose themselves in the greater water, were some wattled huts. As Columba and his two friends strode down the path, fierce triumphant shouts came from a band of tawny-haired warriors, who were nearing the little village by another path. Columba had just succeeded in learning from Canice and Comgall their Pictish tongue, and could make out some of the words that were shouted.

“It is the blood feud,” he said to his companions, and his face looked sad but determined. “They have gone out to battle and have slain many of another clan. Tomorrow the other clan will attack them in revenge. So the strife goes on from father to son.”

By this time the warriors had caught sight of the coracle-laden men and had stopped their shouting in amazement. For the strangers looked different in dress and in the color of their hair from any of their own people. Besides, they were not armed. What could it mean?

Steadily the three marched on toward the village, holding up one hand as a sign of peace. At last the warriors and the walkers met as they reached the huts. The men with the spears expected the men with the coracles to look rather frightened, and to beg that they should not be hurt. But Columba had been, in his own country, a warlike Prince, who had fought many battles. He had looked death in the face so often that he was not likely to fear it now.

When the men got quite close to each other so that they could see each others’ eyes, it was the turn of the ferocious Picts to feel not quite comfortable. For Columba looked at them with clear eyes that seemed to gaze right into their hearts, an expression that was friendly but sad.

“Brothers,” said Columba in his wonderful ringing voice that had in it the sound of a silver clarion, “brothers, I have heard your shouts of joy. You have killed enemies. You say that your gods of war are glad that you have shed blood. I say your gods are nothing. There is one God and He is a God of love, a Father—and not a God of war. You say that you must have ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but the One God-Father sent His Son to earth, and He said, ‘Love your enemies’.”

The fierce warriors knew when they had met some one braver than themselves. Some of them scowled and gripped their spears tighter. But others said to Columba and his friends that they must have some food with them and stay in their village till morning and tell them more of this strange teaching. So they stayed.

It felt strange to Columba to be sitting in the little huts of these savage men. For he had come from Ireland, which at that time, fifteen hundred years ago, had some of the best university-monasteries in the world, while Columba himself had lived in his home as a Prince. His mother was named Princess Ethne and his father Prince O’Donnell, and he was born in Clartan in rocky Donegal, where they had their baby baptized by a young minister named Connahan, who became the young Prince’s teacher.

Connahan had invented a way of teaching little Columba to read which many boys will think was a splendid idea. He had biscuits made in the shape of the letters of the alphabet. When little Columba had learned a letter he ate the biscuit. It is hardly surprising that he learnt them quite quickly. When Prince Columba grew bigger he went under a more clever tutor, called Finnian, head of the Clonard Monastery.

The work that he enjoyed most of all there was copying beautiful books. For, of course, there was no printing, and all the books were written very carefully on parchment or vellum, which is made from the skins of calves. The capital letters and the headings of chapters in these books were painted in the most gorgeous gold, red, and blue, with such wonderful colors that they look today as bright as in the hour when they were finished. You are even shown at Dublin today a book which is said to have been copied by Columba when at college.

This book-copying started the most dreadful quarrel of Columba’s whole life. For he copied a lovely book of the Psalms which was lent to him. When the owner found this out he was so fiercely angry that he asked the King of Ireland to say to whom the new book belonged. Columba said, “It is mine, because I wrote it.” The owner said, “It is mine, because it is a copy of mine.” The King put his hand to his forehead and looked dreadfully wise—though he was really very much puzzled. He ordered some huge law books to be dusted and brought to him. Then he said this wise sentence: “To every cow belongs its calf, so to every book belongs its copy.”

Columba quite lost his temper at this, and got all the men who served him to sharpen their spears and swords and fight for the book. He won in battle, but thousands of men were killed. This upset Columba very much when he thought of it quietly, after his temper was over. His name means “Dove,” and he was really as tender as a dove, though he was so very strong and brave.

He had a great friend named Molaise, one of those people who make you feel that if you are in great trouble or disgrace he is the very man to go and talk to about it all. Molaise was terribly pained with Columba, and said how awful it was of him to kill all these men just for a few pages of coloured parchment. Columba got very red and ashamed.

“What shall I do to make up for it?” he asked.

“Go away across the sea to the rough fighting people of Scotland,” said Molaise; “and teach them to stop war and to love each other.”

The very first thing that Columba did was the most difficult. He went to the man against whom he had fought and said, “Please forgive me.”

Columba loved Ireland very, very deeply. Her green valleys and her grey monasteries held him tight. But he had made up his mind to go to work in Scotland. So the ship was prepared and a number of very close friends got ready to go to him. They all went in the evening to the sea-shore, and there prayed right through the night. The ship was to sail at cock-crow. And Columba found himself wishing with all his strength that there might not be a cock within sound, or that if there were he might have no head. As he was wishing this the sound was heard of a cock crowing before the first glimmer of light came up from the east across the sea. A west wind was blowing, so the ship was soon bowling over the Irish Sea towards the sunrise—and the land of the Picts.

With Columba were twelve disciples, whom he called “my fellow-soldiers.” As they neared the coast of Scotland they saw a beautiful island called Oronsay. “That is the very place for us to land,” they said, “and build a monastery from which to go out and teach the people.” So they put into a little bay and went ashore. It was a very hilly island, and Columba climbed straight to the top of the highest hill. Then he looked west across the sea. There, hanging like some dim cloud on the farthest edge of the ocean, he could see the Irish coast. Columba could not bear it, for he was home-sick for Ireland. He came down the hill again to the little boat in the bay, saying—

“We must go farther away, for if I see my native land I shall always be wanting to go back there.”

They put out to sea again and sailed on till they reached another island with the beautiful name Iona. They took out the axes which were in the boat and hewed away at the trees till they had cut them down and lopped the branches. With these they built wattled huts in which to live. Columba’s hut was on a spot a little higher than the ground where the other men had theirs.

They all worked very hard. In the morning one of them would go out with a plough. The ground was poor and not very deep, so it was not easy to get good vegetables and corn out of it. Another man would go down to the shore and sail a little way out from the land, letting down his net for some fish. A third would take the pigs their food and let the cows and goats out to graze.

This work could only be done in spare time, for Columba put his learning of the language and his preaching first. A narrow strip of sea separated the island from a place called Mull, and then there was some more sea between Mull and the mainland. Columba would cross to Mull, talking with the workers while they dug in the fields and telling his message to the fishermen as they looked over their nets, so that in quite a short time many of them had made up their minds to follow Jesus Christ.

At last a day came when Columba felt moved to a longer journey. So he set out with his men in their coracles, paddling and sailing up the silver chain of lakes that stretches across Scotland in Inverness. Whenever they met men by the roadside or stopped for rest in their villages, one and another of this little band of hero-pilgrims would speak to the people to tell them of the joy that would come in their lives if they loved instead of fighting one another in one weary waste of blood.

The journey took them many days. Often they were tired, but generally they had joy in their work, with love of birds and trees and the open air, the sound of water rippling against the sides of their coracles, with sleep in the cool freshness of the night, with waking to see the stars fade in the light of the sun. They would rise and start again on their travel as the white, gleaming mists stole quietly away from the waters of the lake. As they paddled along they would sing a morning hymn, when Columba’s voice would bring echoes from the mountains.

The goal of their journey was the palace of a heathen Pictish king, called King Brude. I can always remember his name, for he ought to have been called “King Rude.” He slammed the gates of his palace in the face of Columba and his men. Columba had no weapons. He just stayed outside, spoke to the people whom he met, and prayed. Sometimes the old priests of the gods of war—the Druids—would come when Columba started speaking, and they would howl and shout so that the people should not hear him. But, luckily, Columba had one of the finest voices that any man on earth ever used. So he would raise his voice in a mighty shout that—we are told—could be heard more than a mile away. This was altogether too much for the poor Druids, who put their hands to their ears and ran home.

At last King Brude was so influenced that he opened the gates of his palace to Columba, and we are told that after many days he decided that—like the fishermen and peasants—he too would follow Jesus Christ.

Columba never really stopped having a boy’s heart inside him. The story is told of a poor, ragged, mischievous, ugly boy who lived in a monastery. All the people scolded him till it was quite fixed in his mind that he was always going to be stupid and a nuisance to everybody.

One day Columba was coming to the monastery. “Go away and hide your ugly face,” said some of the men in the monastery. “We don’t want Columba to imagine that we have wretched, troublesome boys like you living here.”

The boy thought that he had been disobedient so many times that one more scolding would not matter. So when Columba, whom he had been told was very kind, came to the place, he got quietly in among the monks as they walked along following Columba and singing psalms. Then, with a beating heart, he stretched out his hand and touched Columba’s clothes.

At once the great, kind hero stopped, caught the boy by the shoulder, and swung him round so that he could see him. The boy trembled all over, especially when the people shouted out, “Send away that naughty boy.”

“Be quiet,” said Columba, and it quite startled the boy to hear the monks being scolded instead of himself.

“My son,” said Columba, “open your mouth and put out your tongue.”

Poor Ernan, for that was his name, felt worse than you have ever felt when a doctor has looked over his spectacles and said, “Open your mouth and put out your tongue.” But he took courage from the kind look on Columba’s face and put out his tongue. And when Columba put out his hand Ernan did not shrink away but just stood quite still. By this time the wondering monks had stopped saying “Send that naughty boy away.” In perfect silence they heard Columba bless the boy’s tongue, and then turn round and tell them that the boy would become greater than any of them, while God would give his tongue the power to speak so that men’s hearts would grow warm and they would turn into good paths.

This so much stirred up ugly Ernan that he thought, “Well, if Columba thinks that, then I will try to do as he says.” The result was that he stopped being a nuisance, the monks began to like him very much, and he grew up one of the splendid saints of Ireland.

Columba, until he was quite old, loved to take a sickle and help in with the harvest or dig and plough in the seed-time. And he always enjoyed very much the long rambles over the heather-covered hills and through the bracken and oaks in the valleys, as he went from village to village to tell the people to love God and one another. Very many listened to him and stopped fighting, and, even if they broke out into quarrels with one another, both sides loved Columba and looked very much ashamed when he came and told them how naughty it was. But he never said this in a superior way, as though he was himself good, for he always remembered how hot-blooded he was when he was young and how he had fought just for a book.

When his legs grew so old that they could no longer carry him to the fields, he lay on his simple pallet and prayed for the monks who were at work. They used to say that it seemed as though his spirit came to meet them on the way back from the fields. It made them lose all the feeling of utter tiredness, and they would walk along quite briskly with lively talk and good comradeship.

At last in the time of harvest they got a cart and put Columba up into it. Then he was driven to the barn to look in and see the corn. He blessed the corn as he had blessed Ernan’s tongue. On their way back they stopped and rested, for Columba was so old and weak that he could hardly bear the jolting of the cart.

An old white horse that had gone many, many journeys and had carried the milk every day from the cow-shed to the monastery, happened to come by at that time. It stopped when it reached Columba, who had often patted it and given it hay. But it had not stopped to be patted, for it put its head against Columba’s breast, moaning and shedding tears. The driver raised his whip to make the old white horse go away. But Columba said—

“Let it alone, as it is so fond of me, let it pour out its grief. God has clearly told it that its master is going to leave it.”

Then Columba blessed the horse, which walked away sadly.^[2]

So Columba was carried to the top of a small hill where he could see all the lands of the monastery. He then blessed it and went to his small hut. There he took his pen and continued the work of which he had been fond all his life. He went on copying out the psalms. At last he wrote the verse, “They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing,” and was too tired to go on.

He lay down upon his stone bed to rest, and gave his old and loved servant Diormit some messages of love. In the middle of the night the sound of the monastery bell was heard calling them to worship. Columba tottered to the chapel and knelt there. His servant held him while Columba lifted up his hand in blessing. His face shone with radiant joy. His eyes flashed with happiness. The vision of the City had come to him. He sailed across the last stretch of life to that gleaming City. His coracle touched the golden sand. He had found his Quest.

In an old, red, American farm-house, called Fruitlands, with neither wood for fire nor corn for food, a lonely family looked out on rolling drifts of snow. It was December in New England. For years the Alcotts had lived in that home with other friends. But the friends had one by one left them. Their father had wonderful ideas of living simply with plain food and clothes, and of going to bed at sunset and getting up at sunrise. But he did not know how to work the farm lands by himself, so they were very poor. Their mother knew how to make clothes and food for her four children out of almost nothing, but she could not make them out of simply nothing at all.

The four daughters, Louisa, Anna, Lizzie and May loved the old barn, the shady orchard and the rolling meadows. In the field they had played at horses and in the wood they had been fairies in linen gowns and paper wings. But now they were to leave it all. They took their last meal of potatoes, bread and water. A great sled, with oxen drawing it, came to the door. Their few tables and beds were piled on the sled. The four girls climbed on to the top of this little rick of furniture. The whips cracked and, clutching one another for support, Louisa, Anna, Lizzie and May went rolling along on the sled as it slowly slipped over the snow. Behind them, arm in arm, walked father and mother.

Louisa enjoyed it more than the others, because she was the “boy” of the family. “I was a boy under my bib and tucker,” she once said afterwards. She had always liked wandering off in search of adventure. When she was a little mite and they were moving by steamer from Philadelphia to Boston, she was suddenly missed. A frantic search all over the boat failed to find her, till some one went into the engine-room, where they found her explaining that it was “all nice and dirty.” She had gone to “see wheels go wound.” At another time she ran away and spent the day with some Irish children playing on ash-heaps and on the open common. Presently her playmates went to their homes, but Louisa was “lost.” It grew dark. She saw a big, kind-looking dog on a doorstep, so she sat down and, putting her head on his back, went to sleep. She was awakened by the sound of a bell and the voice of the town-crier shouting the loss of “a little girl six years old, in a pink frock, white hat and new green shoes.” A small, piping voice came from the dark doorstep, “Why, dat’s me!”

Often when her mother called to her, Louisa’s voice would come back from the top of one of the trees which she was always climbing, while she would leap over fences and run races till all the others were thoroughly tired. Excepting her own sisters she would only play with girls who were tomboys, and she would not play with any boys who were not as good as herself at running and jumping. When she grew up and wrote books they were just bubbling with boys.

The sisters were very fond of playing “Let’s Pretend.” They had “Make Believe,” “Jack in the Beanstalk” and “Cinderella,” and often climbed from the City of Destruction in the cellar to the Celestial City in the attic, with a special scene from The Pilgrim’s Progress on each landing. The pilgrims had their mother’s piece-bags tied on their backs for Christian’s burden, with hats, sticks and rolls of paper in proper Bunyan style.

One great “Let’s Pretend” of theirs was “Brops.” “The Brop,” Louisa Alcott says, “is a winged four-footed animal with a youthful, merry human face. When it walks the earth it grunts, when it soars it gives a shrill hoot; occasionally it stands upright and talks good English. Its body is usually covered with a substance like a shawl, sometimes red, sometimes blue, often plaid, and, strange to say, they frequently change skins with one another. On their heads they have a horn very like a stiff, brown-paper lamp-lighter. Wings of brown-paper flap from their shoulders when they fly; this is never very far from the ground, as they usually fall with violence if they attempt any lofty flights. They browse over the earth, but can sit up and eat like a squirrel. Their favorite food is seed-cake; apples also are freely taken and some times raw carrots nibbled when food is scarce. They live in dens, where they have a sort of nest, much like a clothes-basket, in which the little Brops play till their wings are grown. These singular animals quarrel at times, and it is on these occasions that they burst into human speech, call each other names, cry, scold, and sometimes tear off horns and skin, declaring fiercely that they won’t play.”

Louisa often had what she called “thinks.” Before the sun was up she would, when still a girl, go out over the hills in the summer morning. There she would sit in the quiet hush of the woods watching through the tree-trunks for the glory and crimson glow of the sun rising across the hills. Seeing the sun rise to shine on the beautiful tree trunks and feeling the open air all round her seemed to help her, when she was quite young, to know and love God.

She began writing a journal before she was ten years old. This, for instance, is what she wrote on Sept. 1, 1843, when she was ten years old.

When Louisa and her sisters left Fruitlands on the sled, they went to stay with some friends through the winter. But in the spring they moved again to a place called Concord, where some of the loveliest writers of books lived. For instance, there was Emerson, who became Louisa’s hero and told her what books to read; Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Thoreau, who loved being out of doors more than almost anybody who ever lived, and has written a beautiful book about his life in the woods. The book is called Walden.

They went to school in Emerson’s barn, and often he would go with them on an excursion, rolling them into a gaily-decorated hay-cart which would trundle off to a place where they could bathe, play “Indians,” pick berries and have a picnic lunch close to the wooden hut where Thoreau lived. Thoreau showed them the secret places where rare wild flowers grew. Sometimes Louisa would walk with him twenty miles, and Thoreau showed her every trick of the squirrels, the ants and the birds. Or he would paddle her along in his canoe like some wild Indian, calling the birds around him and luring the very fishes to the surface to feed out of his hand.

Thus Louisa Alcott grew up. Some one who knew her says, “She was tall and graceful as a deer, her hair was a beautiful glossy chestnut mane, her complexion was clear and full of color, and her blue eyes were deep-set and most expressive.” “I try to keep down vanity,” said Louisa herself, “about my long hair, my well-shaped head and my good nose.”

Her father and mother were still very poor, and Louisa, when she was twenty-three, started out from Concord to Boston to earn her living and try to help them. She wanted to earn her living by writing stories. But she had no money to go on with, and could not wait on the chance of her stories being accepted and then paid for later. So she hemmed pillow-cases, sheets, white neckties and handkerchiefs; sometimes sewing on and on all through the night so that she could send her mother a shawl or one of her sisters a new hat. Then she rushed home to nurse her sister Lizzie through scarlet fever. Yet she managed to write a story each month; one paid the butcher’s bill, another put down a new carpet, while a third bought a new frock for her sister.

When her sister was better, Louisa went off again to seek her fortune in Boston. “When I set out that day with all my worldly goods in the little old trunk and my own earnings in my pocket, and much hope and resolution in my soul, my heart was very full, and I said to the Lord, ‘Help us all, and keep us for one another,’ as I never said it before, while I looked back at the dear faces watching me, so full of love and faith and hope.” She took a little attic room, which was called her “sky parlor.” There she sewed, wrote stories and taught children, sending home to her mother every penny she could spare. Again Louisa went home to nurse her sister, who died, and to help her mother.

“I have plans simmering,” she said, “but must sweep and dust and wash my dish-pans a little longer till I see my way. I can simmer novels while I do my housework.” She “dreamed toast, talked apple-sauce, thought pies and wept cakes.” She “sewed like a steam-engine.” The family moved to another house. Louisa and her sisters papered and painted the rooms with their own hands, laid carpets, made and hung curtains, while one of them drew the pictures that were to hang on the walls. They had games in the evening, playing charades and telling “creepy” tales over apples and roast chestnuts.

Soon after Christmas Louisa started to write a new novel. She called it Success when she started it, but ten years later when it was at last published, she simply called it Work. It did not get finished at once, for her mother felt ill and Louisa shut up her book and started nursing. When her mother got better Louisa began writing at a mad speed for three weeks, not even taking time to get up in the morning or have proper meals. The writing-paper spread round her in a perfect sea of white manuscript. She would nibble an apple and scribble her novel day and night, till at last her head was dizzy, her legs shaky, and she could not sleep, so she threw away her pen, put the lid on her inkstand and walked and walked till she was better. Then just as she was feeling well and wanted to start again, a family of girls came to stay with them, and Louisa had to lay down her pen and take up the stew-pan and washing-up brush, after having a good weep in the attic on a plump rag-bag.

Then came the blare of trumpets and the tramp of soldiers as the war for freeing the slaves began. Ever since a negro boy had saved her from drowning as a little girl in the Boston Frog Pond, Louisa had been passionately set on freeing the slaves. She could not fight, but she could nurse. She travelled to the front. She managed to get some fun out of her work. Her first duty was to wash the “dirty, bedraggled heroes,” who came in wounded. She says—

“If the nurse had requested me to shave them all, or dance a hornpipe on the stove, I should have been less staggered, but to scrub some dozen lords of creation at a moment’s notice! However, I drowned my scruples in my wash-bowl, clutched my soap manfully, and assuming a business-like air, made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw.”

When she had been crying her eyes out at the death of a soldier in one ward, she would run to her room, wash her eyes, smooth her hair and dart off to another ward to start the soldiers there laughing and joking.

She was working terribly hard. The doctor saw that she was getting ill and ordered her off duty, but she would not go. At last she says, “My head felt like a cannon-ball, the walls waved, people looked unnaturally big, and the very bottles on the mantelpiece appeared to dance derisively before my eyes . . . . I wished I could take off my body and work in my soul.”

At last she could not stand any longer. She went to bed and was so ill that she never really got her splendid health back again. She had given away her health to the soldiers. And the doctors had to cut off her beautiful chestnut hair. She wrote some letters for a magazine as she was getting better, about her experiences as a nurse. They thrilled everybody who read them. A publisher brought them out in book form. Straightway three publishers were asking for her work. She sent off another book to a publisher, and just as she was sitting on the floor putting down a carpet, she got a reply saying that he could publish it at once.

The next year Louisa was off from America to England, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, travelling with a gentleman’s invalid daughter. The fun and frolic, the sights and enjoyments of this trip she crammed into the second volume of the book which she wrote when she got back to America—Little Women. Publishers paid her well for her stories now, so she gave bonnets and shawls to her mother, kept her old home all supplied with good things, sending a new dress for her sister at home and sleds for her little nephews. When she had written Little Women, the publisher thought it dull, but published it. It was the publisher who was dull. For tens of thousands of boys and girls simply leapt at it and cuddled it in sofa corners and arm-chairs, laughing over the romps and crying at the sad places, writing to demand a sequel at once with everybody married to the right people. Louisa put herself into Little Women, where she is called “Jo,” Mrs. Alcott was “Marmee,” Anna was “Meg,” Lizzie was “Beth,” May was “Amy,” while “Laurie” was a delightful boy whom Louisa had met in Switzerland.

She had worked very, very hard to keep her parents and sisters. Her body often ached with the effect of the illness that came when she was a nurse. She was very tired. So she went away to Europe again for a holiday. But when she was there the news came that her sister’s husband had died, leaving two little boys whom Aunt Louisa loved very much. There was no money to keep these boys now that their father had gone. So Louisa, in the middle of her holiday, sat down and wrote and wrote, till she had finished Little Men, which she sent off to the publisher. He brought out the book and paid her enough money to keep the boys in food and clothes and send them to school for quite a long time. She worked so hard at this and other books in order to help others, that at last the thumb of her right hand was so cramped that it became practically paralyzed.

Then when she was in the thick of writing some splendid story, it would be necessary for her to stop in order to nurse a sister or her mother. This she always did gladly, but it was a terrible strain, for she had never been really strong herself since she had nursed the soldiers. She had become very famous now, and it was difficult for her to get quietness. Reporters sat on her garden wall writing about her as she picked pears. She wrote loads of autographs in ricks of albums. She was nearly kissed to death by gushing girls. Then a little baby girl was left to her charge by Louisa’s sister May, who died at the time when the baby was born. So Louisa became a mother-aunt to this little niece. The baby was born in Europe and had to be brought right across the Atlantic Ocean in a great ship.

Louisa waited for it on the quay. “At last the captain came, holding in his arms a tiny yellow-haired creature, all in white, who looked about her with lively blue eyes, and chattered in her baby way.”

“I held out my arms to Lulu,” said Miss Alcott, “only being able to say her name. She looked at me for a moment, then came to me, saying, ‘Marmar’ in a wistful way, resting close, as if she had found her own people and home at last—as she had, thank Heaven! The little princess was received with tears and smiles, and being washed and fed, went quietly to sleep in her new bed, while we brooded over her.”

She loved working for her father and the baby girl. But let us take one peep into her own sacred, hidden feelings just to understand how hard it was to keep on. She writes—

Was not she a real heroine of the home?

She was, in the words that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of his wife,

“STEEL-TRUE AND BLADE STRAIGHT.”

I

It was night; silent save for the distant howl of a jackal or the grunt of a sleeping camel. Overhead the bright stars made tiny points in the intense darkness of the Eastern sky. From a window high up in the wall of the city of Damascus some men looked out, peering down through the blackness to gauge the height of the window from the ground.

The window opened into a room built in the very wall of the city itself. A group of men were standing within. “Here are the rope and the basket,” one said, pointing to a deep wicker basket and a stout rope.

One of the men, with piercing, deep-set eyes and a face of great power and patience, knelt down. The others knelt with him, and together they prayed to God for Damascus city, for the men in it who were trying to kill Saul, and for his own safe journeying. The dim lamp was put out. Quietly they slung the basket from the window and Saul lowered himself into it. They listened for any sound or sign of enemies, but none came. Slowly and carefully they let down the basket, foot by foot, while Saul, standing in it, held on tightly to the rope with his strong hands. At last the rope slackened. They began to pull it up. And in a few moments they had it safely back in the room. They closed the shutters, while Saul walked rapidly southward through the darkness.

He was alone and Damascus was full of enemies who wished to take his life. Yet he had no fear. He had been brave all through his life, but now any little fear that he had ever had was cast out.

As he walked he thought of the life he had lived ever since he could remember. He would recall how, as a boy, he had lived far away across those mountains and the gulf on which the morning sun was now shining. He would think of that busy city of Tarsus and its lake-harbor port where Greeks and proud Roman soldiers jostled shoulder to shoulder with Jews, while shining, crafty Egyptians, black Africans and subtle brown Arabian traders bargained and bought and sold. He remembered the pointed brown sails of the boats, the swaying, dizzy masts and the rippling water; the camels swinging down to the quay-side with their loads, and all the busy life of the port.

Tarsus had been his birthplace, where the tawny river Cydnus flowed down the grey gorges of the Taurus Mountains and through the flat plain to the Mediterranean Sea. His father was really a Jew, but he lived in this Greek-speaking city in Cilicia, and he was a Roman citizen. This mixture of Jew, Greek and Roman helped Saul when he grew up to be wonderfully broad-minded and generous.

He recalled now that, as a boy, he had not gone to school with the Greek or Roman boys, but at the Jewish synagogue. Mostly the lessons were memory ones. Little Saul had to learn very long pieces out of the Law of Moses and the history of the Kings. He was so keen a student that he was sent to the College of Masters (or Rabbis) at Jerusalem. There he sat at the feet of one of the best rabbis who ever lived, whose name was Gamaliel. First Saul became a junior and then a senior rabbi.

He belonged to a very strictly religious people called Pharisees (which means that they were “separate” from the common sinners). They were so strict that they said that you must not pick an ear of corn or even pull out a grey hair on the Sabbath day, because it was a kind of reaping. You might rub your foot on the pavement on the Sabbath, but not on the earth, as that would be a kind of ploughing. So Saul would remember as he walked along how he was brought up to believe that people who broke any of these or hundreds of other hard rules were terribly wicked and ought to be punished. While he was a young rabbi, however, another Young Man had been growing up in Palestine near Jerusalem, who thought the people who said you must keep all these rules but forgot to be loving were the people who gave most pain to God their Father; more wicked than the rough tax-gatherers and the people who were usually called sinners. This Young Leader said that the Pharisees were wolves in sheep’s clothing, play-acting hypocrites, like whitewashed graves. You can imagine that when Jesus Christ told the proud superior Pharisees these things to their faces they got thoroughly angry, and even more so when He also encouraged His followers when they plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath and did not wash their hands in the particular way that the Pharisees said was right.

When Jesus was crucified, the people who followed Him were called Nazarenes, which is like a London man sneering at somebody from a village as “a country yokel.” These “Nazarenes” grew in number till the Pharisees became alarmed and started putting them in prison or killing them.

Saul remembered now, with a shudder, how he thought then that God wanted him to kill the Nazarenes, and especially how he stood one day while angry men took off their cloaks and put them at his feet, so that their arms would be freed to throw stones at a man named Stephen, who was a follower of Jesus. Stone after stone they hurled through the air, smiting poor Stephen on the body and then on the head, till bleeding and fainting he had fallen to the ground and died. As Saul had stood there he heard Stephen say two things: “Lord, do not blame them for this sin,” and “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

Saul, as he walked on southward to Jerusalem, would wring his hands with sorrow that he had ever helped these cruel men to kill good, heroic Stephen. And he would remember how the face of Stephen had seemed to haunt him for days after. Saul had always been very clever with his brains, and he could not help seeing that there must be something wonderful that would make a strong man like Stephen be so loving to people who threw stones at him to kill him. He had begun to wonder whether the Nazarenes were not right after all.

So—some months before his escape in the basket—Saul had been hurrying towards Damascus to drag to prison the men and women who worshipped Jesus there. Yet his conscience was pricking him, as the driver’s goad pricked the stubborn ox in the plough. But he was too proud to give in. Suddenly, a Voice and a blazing Light stopped him. The Voice said,

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”

“Who are you, Master?” he asked.

“I am Jesus, Whom you persecute. It is hard for you to kick against the goad.”

“What will you have me to do?” faltered poor blinded Saul, as he fell to the earth.

“Stand up and go into the city, and there it shall be told you what you must do.”

How mad he must have seemed to be to his friends in Damascus! He had started there to imprison the followers of Jesus; now he himself was a follower of Jesus. He was a proud, bullying young rabbi when he had started; now he was quite humble and ready to love even those who wanted to kill him when they found how he had changed. Nor can he have been surprised that they should want to kill him when he followed Jesus, because he himself had wanted to kill Jesus’ followers only a few weeks before. The very letter that was tucked inside his tunic, giving him power to hale the Nazarenes to prison and death—why, it was now an authority for throwing himself into prison!

II

Saul had been led into Damascus blinded by the light that had shone around him. When his eyesight was given back to him he went out into the Arabian desert. There he thought of all the things the followers of Jesus had said to him of the life of Christ and of His death. He had now made up his mind that all the little rules of the Pharisees, even if kept perfectly all the time, do not make you really good. He saw that God does not ask a man or a boy to be good in order that He may love him, but that God loves us always because we are His children, and that really believing in that Father-love (which Jesus came to show to us) makes us good children of the Father. Saul now also believed for the first time that black and white, slave and free, Jew, Greek, Roman, and Arabian were all alike the children of God.

At last when all his quiet thinking was over, Saul came back to Damascus and so angered the Jews by preaching Christ that he had to escape by being let down from the wall in the basket. From Damascus he was now on his way—not to a place of safety—but to the centre of all the hate against the Nazarenes, Jerusalem. There he discovered that the followers of Jesus found it very difficult to believe that he was not just a spy. And the Pharisee Jews, who used to say what a splendid young man he was, would not listen to him now that he had changed his mind. But God spoke to him in the Temple, and said, “I have called you to be My missionary.” So he started out from Jerusalem and left Palestine, going first to his native home at Tarsus, where it was most difficult to tell his old friends that he had become a despised, sneered-at Nazarene—a follower of Jesus.

From Tarsus he was called by his friend Barnabas to preach and teach with him in glittering Antioch in Syria, the Heathen Queen of the cities of the Roman Empire, and from Antioch to many, many cities in Cyprus and Asia Minor and in Greece; he even at last went to Rome itself.

It was in the lovely island of Cyprus where he faced and won the Roman governor, Sergius Paulus, that he laid aside his Jewish name of Saul and became Paul the Christian Roman citizen.

Sometimes you may have been obliged to learn tiresome lists of the difficult names of the places to which Paul travelled. It is really easy to remember the names when you think of the wonderful and exciting things that happened at each place and remember what a hero Paul was in going with his message to the people, in spite of being nearly killed again and again.

For instance, one can always remember Antioch, because there the followers of Jesus were first nicknamed “Christians” by the people who laughed at Paul and his teaching. It is difficult now to realize that the name Christian, which we are proud of today, was once a scornful nickname. It was also at Antioch that people first decided, under Paul’s guidance, that you could be a Christian without going through Jewish ceremonies. Paul was the first man to be so broad-minded as this.

Again, one can remember Lystra, because a splendid boy named Timothy lived there with his Jewish father, his Greek mother, having a beautiful name—Eunice, and with his grandmother Lois. This boy Timothy would see Paul and his friend Barnabas at Lystra healing a cripple. Because of this the people first worshipped them, but later actually threw stones at Paul and left him nearly dead because he preached to them that Jesus broke down the division between the Jews and the other nations. Timothy, like any boy who really got to know Paul, could not help loving him and thinking him the finest of heroes. So later on Timothy travelled with Paul to many places, being proud to carry his cloak for him.

One day Paul started with his friends, Luke, the loving doctor, and Silas, with young Timothy, to go farther from home than they had ever been before. They marched together along hundreds of miles of the Roman roads over Asia Minor till they reached Troas on the shore of the lovely Ægean Sea. There Paul had dreamed that a man from Macedonia in Greece said, “Come over and help us.” So Paul and his friends went down to the harbour at Troas, took passage on a ship and sailed away north-westward over the blue water of the Ægean Sea. Towards evening they reached a beautiful oval island called Samothrace, where they stayed through the night, and in the morning they set sail again and reached a port called Neapolis. From that place they walked quite ten miles along the Roman road to the city called Philippi.

Here Paul and his friends had quite a strange adventure. They were going down to the waterside to pray with other Jews, when they met a slave-girl who used to bring in a great deal of money to her owners by telling fortunes. She would keep following Paul and the others, shouting out, “These men are servants of God and tell you the Way of Salvation.” When she had been calling this out for a very long time and making everybody stare and some laugh, Paul at last got quite tired of it, and turning round commanded the power by which she did this to come out of her.

This made her owners most angry, because they saw that she would never earn money for them any more. So they caught hold of Paul and Silas and dragged them off to the market square in the centre of the town, where the Roman Justices were sitting. The crowd did not know much of what it was all about, but they could see that this was a chance for shouting, and the Philippian boys stopped their play to come and shout too. The magistrates thought that the simplest way of satisfying the people was to have them stripped and whipped with rods, and handed them over to the jailer to put their feet in the stocks in his prison.

It sounded very curious at midnight to hear Paul and Silas, instead of moaning and groaning because they had been beaten and put in prison, singing happy hymns. Suddenly there came an earthquake, which shook the prison and broke the stocks that held Paul’s feet. The jailer jumped up and was so terrified, thinking that he would be killed for letting his prisoners go, that he was just going to kill himself to escape the disgrace. But Paul shouted to him, “Do no injury to yourself; we are all here.”

“Bring torches,” shouted the jailer, and he sprang into the cell and fell trembling at their feet, saying, “How can I be saved?” Then Paul, who was quite calm and strong in all this danger of prison and earthquake, told him to make Jesus’ love the one object of his life. The jailer began straight away to show that love himself, by getting water and washing all the blood and dirt from the bruised and beaten backs of Paul and Silas.

At last morning came, and the magistrates sent a message that Paul and Silas could go free. “No, indeed,” said Paul; “they took us, Roman citizens, and without trial they beat us and threw us into prison. Let them come and fetch us.”

The magistrates were terribly frightened at this. For they would be in awful disgrace if the Emperor at Rome heard that they had beaten Roman citizens. So they came and apologized to Paul and Silas, saying that they were very sorry indeed and please would they go away from Philippi? After this Paul and his friends went round through many Greek cities; Thessalonica with its busy harbour, “out-of-the-way” Berœa (as Cicero called it), lovely and learned Athens, Corinth the great commercial and governing capital of Achaia, glorious Ephesus in Asia with its marvellous temple and theatre.

At Athens, Paul stood up before the learned people of that city and gave them a fine speech, the best-known speech in all the world. Again, in Corinth, Paul saw all kinds of people from every part of the world, and in the Cenchreæ harbour ships with shining sails. At Corinth Paul joined a man named Aquila, who, like himself, was a tent-maker. So Paul made tents with his own brown, strong fingers. You might be quite sure that if you camped out under one of Paul’s tents, it would be so well made that no rain could beat through it or wind blow it away.

While he stitched and cut and tied cords to make tents, Paul would be thinking what he would say when he next preached to the Corinthians. Jesus, when He was thinking what to say to people, would notice the seed of the waving corn, the birds in the trees, the flowers in the field, and the wind that blew where it liked across the mountain. But Paul noticed the many things that happened in towns. He saw a potter quickly and wonderfully moulding the clay into shape, as it whirled round on the wheel, and sometimes the potter made a lovely vase to hold exquisite lilies, while at another time he made a rough bowl for washing up; but all to some use. “See,” Paul would say, “that is how God makes us, one to do special work, another to do common work. The only thing that really matters is doing the thing that we are made for as well as ever we can.”

Then Paul might go and see the sports at the Isthmian games near Corinth, and he would see men with clenched teeth and straining limbs racing round the track with hair flying in the wind.

“These men run like this for a wreath of leaves which will wither away. How much more ought we to run to the goal, which is Jesus, in order to win an everlasting wreath. And look,” he would go on, “at the boxer. He doesn’t wave his arms wildly in the air. Just in that way, I hit hard and straight; and I box and buffet my own body so that I shall be master of it.”

He stayed for a long time at Corinth, tent-making and preaching, and then took the journey back again from Corinth across the sea to Ephesus and thence to Cæsarea, where he landed and went along the road to Jerusalem.

III

Most people, when they had been beaten and imprisoned as Paul had, would say, “Well, that is enough. I have done as much as can be asked of me.” But Paul was so eager for the work and adventure which always come from really following Jesus, that he soon started off again.

This time, after visiting quite a number of old friends in many towns, he went to the wonderful city called Ephesus. The most beautiful thing in that strange and splendid city was a marble temple to a goddess called Diana. Paul preached and spoke with such great effect that many people who used to worship Diana stopped doing so and worshipped Jesus instead. Now there were many people in Ephesus who earned their living by making little silver, and marble and terra-cotta shrines of the goddess, and selling these shrines to worshippers of Diana. One of the silver-smiths, named Demetrius, utterly lost his temper. He went to the workmen and said, “Men, you know that this fellow Paul is saying that the things made with our hands are not gods at all. He is ruining our trade.” The workmen shouted, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians,” and the people rushed out of their shops and houses and roared with all their might, though they were not quite sure what it was all about. They seized two Christians, fellow-travellers with Paul, and dragged them to the great open air theatre. Paul thought this was a splendid opportunity of speaking to thousands and thousands of people, but his friends held him back, for they felt sure he would be killed.

Then the Town Clerk went to the theatre and held up his hand after the people had been shouting for about two hours. They stopped to listen, and he told them, quite frankly, how stupid they were to come shouting and making a riot like a disorderly mob, when—if anything wrong had really been done by the Christians—they could bring them before the judge. So they all went home feeling that they had been rather silly.

Paul travelled through the cities of Macedonia and Greece that winter; and then sailed for Jerusalem, having just escaped a plot of the Jews to kill him. On the way he stopped at Miletus, where he was met by disciples from Ephesus. He reminded them that he had earned his own living. “Now you, also,” he said, “should work in the same way, helping those who are weaker than you, and remembering what Jesus said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’.” They were strong, grown men, but they loved Paul so much that when he went away they threw their arms round his neck and kissed him and were sorry beyond measure that he said they would never see his face again.

They tore themselves away, set sail, and by and by came to Cæsarea. Paul was warned there that when he reached Jerusalem he would be chained and put in prison. His friends said, “Do not go.” But he said, “I am ready not only to go and be put in chains in Jerusalem, but even to die there for the sake of the Lord Jesus.” This made them cease from trying to stop him. So they got the baggage-horses loaded and went along the hilly roads from Cæsarea up to Jerusalem.

Paul had not been there more than a week before some Jews, who had seen him at some of the cities in Asia Minor, started to make the people in Jerusalem furious with him. They wished to kill him for the very reason that he had wished to kill Stephen. They believed it was wicked to teach that Jesus was the Son of God, and to say that God sent Him to save the other nations as well as the Jews. They clutched hold of his robe and shouted—

“Help! help! Here is the man who goes all over the land speaking to everybody against the Jews and the Temple and our law.”

The people came rushing up in crowds and dragged Paul out of the Temple. They were just going to kill him, when the Roman Commander of the garrison, Lysias, with some soldiers came marching up as fast as their legs would carry them. This frightened the people, who stopped beating Paul. The Roman commander arrested Paul and put two chains on him.

“What has he done?” shouted the Roman.

Such an awful yell of different accusations went up from the frenzied Jews that the officer could not make out what they were saying. As they went up the steps to the barracks, Paul spoke in Greek to the Roman.

“Do you know Greek?” asked the Roman. “Are not you the Egyptian rebel who led four thousand cut-throats out into the desert?”

“I am a Jew, a citizen of a Greek city,” said Paul, with dignity. “May I speak to the people?”

There was some power of heroism in Paul’s uplifted hand, some gleam of manly bravery in his fearless eye that made the howling mob be silent when he began to speak. They listened in perfect quietness while he told of how he had been brought up a Jew, when a little boy, and how he had even shed the blood of Christians and thrown them into prison. They hardly breathed while he said that Jesus had come to him in blazing light on the way to Damascus, and that he, Paul, had promised to serve Jesus all his life. But directly Paul said that he was told by God to go away from the stubborn Jews to nations in far countries, they were madly angry again, because they thought that the Jews were God’s special people and that God did not belong to other countries as well.

“Away with such a fellow from the earth,” they all shouted in a frenzy of anger. Then they hurled their clothes in the air, and snatching up the dust from the ground threw it into the air.

The officer made up his mind that he must flog Paul to find out the truth, but just as his captain had put a strap round Paul and was going to begin the beating, Paul calmly asked, “Does the law allow you to flog a Roman citizen, and one, too, that is uncondemned?” This thoroughly frightened the Roman, who went off and told the commander, Lysias.

“Why, I had to buy my citizenship with much money,” said the Roman.

“Yes,” said Paul, “but I was born a Roman.”

Next day, while standing before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest Ananias told the men near Paul to smite him on the mouth. Paul answered him angrily, till they told Paul that this was the High Priest. Paul apologized and said he was sorry, and did not point out that it was all really the High Priest’s fault.

Then Paul said something which set the very judges themselves into such a hot argument with each other that the Roman officer took Paul right away from them back to the barracks. A young man, Paul’s nephew, came and reported to Lysias that forty men had bound themselves not to eat food till they had killed Paul. So Lysias ordered seventy cavalry soldiers and two hundred light infantry to start at nine o’clock that night with horses for Paul, so that they could bring him safely to Felix, the Governor, at Cæsarea by the seaside. When the sun had set and all was quiet, the soldiers started off through the night with Paul. And as he rode on his horse and heard the clank of Roman soldiers’ armour around him, Paul realized that he would never see Jerusalem again.

Felix, the Roman Governor, could not make up his mind about Paul, so he left him in prison for about two years. Then Festus succeeded Felix, and Festus asked whether Paul was willing to go back to Jerusalem to be tried. “No,” said Paul, “the Jews have no real charge against me. I appeal to Cæsar—the Emperor at Rome.” About this time King Agrippa came to visit Festus, and said he would like to see and hear Paul.

“Tomorrow,” replied Festus, “you shall.”

So Paul spoke to King Agrippa and told him his case. Agrippa said, “This man has done nothing wrong. He might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Cæsar.”

They took ship and Paul sailed as a prisoner for Rome with his great friends, the loved physician, Luke and Aristarchus of Macedonia. They sailed along for some time, not very fast, for it was autumn and the weather was bad. When they reached a place called Fair Havens, Paul told the captain that he had better put into harbour for the winter. But the captain would not listen to this, especially as a fine breeze from the south sprang up. So having weighed anchor, they sailed along the coast of Crete, keeping close to the shore.

Suddenly the wind swept down in a typhoon from the mountains of the island and the clouds came over from the north-east. The ship had to be put about. They let her drive under the shelter of a little island, near the Syrtis quicksands. The storm raged, and to save the ship they threw out the tackle. For days and nights no sun or star could pierce the thick clouds, while the wind screamed through the rigging and the ship pitched and rolled. Dimly through the noise one midnight they could hear the sound of waves breaking on an unknown shore.

“Throw out the lead,” shouted the captain.

“Twenty fathoms of water,” called the sailor, as he did this. Then a minute after “Fifteen fathoms.”

With frantic speed they threw out four anchors from the stern, for in a few moments they would have been on the rocks. Paul told them not to go off in the boats, and said that they must now have a good meal, to be ready to work when day broke. It was strange that the prisoner should be giving orders and advice, but that was because Paul was the only man on the whole ship who was not afraid, and he was very strong and wise.

At last the dawn came, all cold and with pelting rain. The sailors stood in the bow of the boat with their hands over their eyes eagerly looking at the shore. “See,” said one, “there is a sandy beach between the rocks.” So they cut away the four anchors, hoisted the foresail and steered for the beach. Suddenly, where the sea met in confused waves, they struck the land. The bows would not move; the great waves pounded and smashed the stern to pieces. Those who could swim jumped overboard. The rest took planks and little rafts; and holding themselves up by these were driven ashore.

The natives of the island rushed down to the beach and lighted a fire, in order to dry their wet clothes and warm them in the cold gale. Paul helped to gather sticks, and was throwing some on the fire, when a poisonous snake, called a viper, bit him. He shook it off, and the people said, “He must be a murderer, for justice will not permit him to live.” They expected to see him fall down dead. But after they had waited to see this, and yet no harm came to him, they changed their minds and decided that he must be a god.

Three months later the crew and Paul set sail in another ship called Castor and Pollux, in which at last they reached Rome, where Paul often argued with the Jews and the Romans, telling them about Jesus Christ. He lived in his own house, but as a prisoner wearing a chain and always with a Roman soldier guarding him. What happened when Paul was at last tried, no one knows. All we can say is that, whether he was freed or cast in prison or even slain, he cared for nothing save that he should give to other people the Love that had lifted his own life to the high heroic Pilgrims’ Way along which he had walked. He had fought his good fight and had never been afraid.

Listen again to the words we read at the beginning.

“Three times I have been beaten with Roman rods, once I have been stoned, three times I have been shipwrecked, once for full four and twenty hours I was floating on the open sea. I have served Christ by frequent travelling, amid dangers in crossing rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles; dangers in the city, dangers in the desert, dangers by sea, dangers from spies in our midst; with labour and toil, with many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, in frequent fastings, in cold, and with insufficient clothing.”

The valiant Paul could, indeed, say—

——————————

I

A group of boys gathered quite early in the morning at the spring of water that bubbled up in an Eastern village. From the white cottages, as they caught the first gleams of the rising sun, there came men and women, some bearing bundles and others leading asses. A banner was unrolled by an old rabbi and carried by some strong young men. Near this banner the boys gathered in readiness to start off on their eighty-mile walk. At length the signal was given and the caravan started.

Amongst the youngest of the boys was one whose mother Mary was riding upon a donkey, while her husband Joseph walked alongside. The twelve-year-old boy, Jesus, ran along with some playmates who were all talking about the things that they saw by the roadside. The eager party of pilgrims climbed the winding path that wound among the hills of Nazareth, and then dropped to the plain of Esdraelon.

“Look down there at that line of dust,” said a boy.

“That is a party of people going to the Feast from distant lands—from Asia and from Greece,” said the old rabbi who had travelled the road fifty times. “You will see directly.”

Gradually they came nearer and nearer to the old broader road which was alive with strange-looking men from many countries, but mostly Jews, all going to Jerusalem. The boys saw sad-looking, tawny camels walking along with dignified, silent step, and they noticed the shepherd-boys who neglected their sheep to stare at the many-colored procession.

At one point boys by the roadside put out their tongues and spat on the dust as the procession passed along, while some of the older boys in the caravan, who might have been expected to know better, shouted in derision, “Yah, you dogs of Samaritans.”

As the sun went down every one was walking much more slowly, for they were very tired. But the boys were eager to search round for dry, dead olive and cedar twigs and branches to put on the camp-fire which Joseph had lighted. But they almost nodded to sleep as they ate their crushed dates round the flickering fire. Mary and the other women went under the shelter of rough huts made rapidly from branches, but the boys were proud of sleeping out on the ground under the open sky. After they had said their evening prayer they looked for a few moments at the young crescent moon which swung among the stars. But quickly they fell asleep.

Through two long days the caravan of Nazareth pilgrims walked the roads that led southward to the city, and for two nights they camped in the open field. Then on the third day, as they had walked with tired feet up a hill, there flashed on them, at the top, a vision of the great city itself, with its old wall, its Roman castles, and—on the Hill—the blazing gold and gleaming marble of the Temple itself.

Going on into the city of Jerusalem they had, in spite of the fact that they were footsore, crowded to the Temple to give their freewill offering, and had gone quietly to their upper room to the supper, where there was a slain lamb as a sign that you can only save life at the cost of life; bitter herbs to recall how hard had been their forefathers’ slavery in Egypt in the olden days, and a paste made of crushed fruit and vinegar to remind them of the clay used by those fathers when they were slave brickmakers in Egypt.

There were a thousand sights and sounds to fascinate the boys on the great days of the Feast itself—the shops with their many-coloured goods, over which buyer and seller haggled and argued; the new pilgrims coming late into the City; the fine robes of the priests; the shining brass armour and proud faces of Roman soldiers; the wide terrace where teachers with long white beards sat to answer the questions of all who cared to come and talk with them. These had attracted the boy Jesus more than anything else. He had gone to them and had asked many questions which had astonished the old teachers by the understanding which they showed. He quite lost all feeling of the passing of time as He went again and again, to learn to find new truth among these teachers.

Then suddenly He saw the anxious face of His mother, Mary, as she came up the steps of the Temple and said,

“Child, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been seeking you anxiously.”

Jesus at once went with them. But He had already done what every boy must do sooner or later: He had decided what He must do with His life.

“Did you not know,” He said gently to His mother, “that I must be in my Father’s House?”

The Voice to which He would listen in future would always be the Voice of our Father Who is in heaven.

II

Eighteen years later a Young Man, in company with five younger fishermen, walked two by two along the narrow footpath that followed where a sacred river ran down to a deep and bitter sea. As they talked or hummed a fragment of one of their country’s songs they swung along the path, bearing ever farther and farther from the river, and climbing to the right along the limestone hills through which the waters had cut their way. They were strong men with faces tanned by the sun and wind, and with hands toughened by the handling of cordage and nets—save that One had hands hardened by the use of saw and plane and axe.

They were happy, serious comrades, revelling in the friendship that bound them to one another as they sat on the grass to rest under the shade of an olive-tree listening to the Voice of the Great Companion. Once more they were going up to the Feast. They had gone up to it again and again since they were boys, leaving carpenter’s shop, and boats and nets in order to share in the nation’s thanksgiving for its distant delivery from the slavery of Egypt.

Only a short time before this day, the young fishermen had been at work in their boats, fishing and mending nets on the sunny waters of the Lake. It was the work that their fathers and grandfathers had done before them. They expected that they, too, and their children and children’s children, would continue in it. But they had met this Young Man, Jesus, and that had changed everything.

They had met Him first of all when they had gone down to the Jordan, attracted by the fiery revolutionary prophet named John. It was this shaggy dweller in the wilderness, dressed in a camel-hair loin-cloth, who, stopping in his vehement outbursts against the pious Pharisee, the proud ruler and the learned scholar, had, with an awe and gentleness in his voice that they never heard before, pointed to a Figure in the crowd who gathered there, and had said, “Behold the Lamb of God.”

The people turned, expecting to see some richly-robed prince come to save them from their oppressive rulers. They were amazed. For there stood, in simple poverty, yet splendid dignity, the Carpenter from despised Nazareth.

So Andrew and Simon, John, James and Philip had come to know Him. Knowing Him, they loved and reverenced Him with all the hero-worship of their eager hearts. Even so He had come to them as they worked in their boats near the Garden of Princes, little Bethsaida by Capernaum.

“Follow Me,” He simply said.

By this time to be with Him had been the one thing that they cared about most of all. So they had grounded their boats on the beach, hung up their nets, and were now walking with Him through the hillside paths, lying on the grass listening to His words as He sat on some boulder under the blue vault of heaven, sleeping with Him by a camp-fire under the open sky, watching the dawn come up over the Syrian hills as their Leader came down from the mountain where He had spent the night on His knees in the presence of His Father. They were poorer than ever in money, but they were bubbling with happiness and rich in joy. The foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests, but this Son of Man had nowhere to lay His head, save some stone on a mountain-side. Yet to lay their heads on the same hillside in the quiet sleep of men who had tired themselves in His service was to them a greater joy than to be in the courts of Kings or the palaces of Emperors.

So He walked, a Young Man, among His grown comrades. He knew that He had never disobeyed the Voice of His Father as He had heard it eighteen years back in those Temple Courts toward which they were now striding. All through the years of silence that lay between that first boyish pilgrimage and this day when He walked as a man to Jerusalem, He had done His Father’s will in,

At the bench in the workshop, amid the piles of shavings, and the ox-yokes and plough-handles,

Now as He and His friends entered the city and came close to the Temple, His hands clenched and His eyes blazed with wrath as He heard the chinking of coin and saw the steaming cattle herded in the courtyard of His Father’s House. Jews had come from all parts of the world to this feast. They came from the cities of Asia, and even from distant Greece, from Ephesus, from Corinth and from Philippi. They came with foreign money in their wallets, and the noise that Jesus heard was the chink of gold and silver as the money-changers exchanged this foreign for Jewish money, bargaining loudly and threatening poor people the while as to how much profit they should make.

On His way up to the city Jesus had heard poor peasants saying that they had been saving money all through the year to buy a lamb or a dove at the Temple, so that they might offer it and have their sins—as they thought—wiped away by its blood. And He knew that those foul and abominable servants of the priests were selling to these poor people, for a half-sovereign each, doves that had only cost a farthing, and were saying, “You must buy these doves or your sins will not be forgiven.” These traders were really worse than ordinary robbers, for they were not taking just the purses of the rich, but the hardly-earned savings of poor fishermen and carpenters, shepherds and ploughmen.

It was this that made the Young Carpenter-Prophet, Jesus, so terribly angry as He came into the courtyard of the Temple and heard the oxen lowing, the sheep bleating, the doves jumping in terror in their basket-cages, the angry bargaining of the traders, where as a boy He had surrendered His Will to His heavenly Father. He was usually gentle, but when He saw the poor oppressed and robbed, and heard the song of the Temple children and the quiet voice of prayer drowned by the noise of a cattle-market, His anger burst forth. He took up some of the rushes that lay on the floor, twisted them into a whip, drove out the cattle and the cattle-dealers, overturned the money-changers’ tables, and hurried out those that sold doves, saying—

“My Father’s House is called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of brigands.”

Why did the burly cattle-dealers and the wealthy traders fly out in dread before the flaming wrath of one Young Man with a few twisted rushes in His hand? It was partly that they knew that they were doing wrong. Their consciences made cowards of them. But it was more because there was in Him a courage that did not know the meaning of fear, a splendid knightly dignity before which they were ashamed, a calm sense of power that came from feeling that He was one with His Father Who has all the power in the wide world in the hollow of His hand.

As the traders hurried from the courtyard Jesus heard the hum of gratitude, mingled with astonishment, that came from the peasants who at last saw this wicked custom swept away single-handed by the Peasant-Prophet. He turned to His five astounded followers. It was still another sign of the utter manliness in Him which had drawn these young fishermen to be His devoted friends and eager followers.

III

“It is splendid to have such a leader,” thought the young fishermen. And they wondered if He would arm them and lead the people of villages and towns against their cruel Roman oppressors. “We could make Him the King,” they said to one another. “And He would be the greatest King that ever lived, for He is as tender and merciful as He is strong and just. The people crowd to Him in thousands, because He can heal them as no one ever could in the whole world.”

So they went out with Him into the white stone villages of Galilee and even Samaria. Here He healed a boy who had awful attacks of fits; there He restored to a widow her only son who was dead. He led them farther than they had ever been before. He led them over the hills where the salt wind swept up from the sea, and through shady glens where waters tumbled down to the river. He took them to the busy harbour where a thousand masts swayed on the rolling ships. There they saw brown, lean Egyptians, swarthy Nubians, quick, witty Greeks, and stolid Roman soldiers. To be with Him was to see adventure at every corner of the road. From south to north and back again they swept. The country was large. He needed helpers to go out in all directions. Whom should He choose? He went away from the others up into the quiet, deserted hill-country. He climbed up by a tumbling, gurgling stream, up and up to the shoulder of a great hill. There He sat on a ledge of rock and looked out over the land that He loved as it lay in the light of the moon.

He prayed to His Father to help Him to choose. And He stayed there all through the long night till He had settled on exactly the right men.

Yes, there must be Simon, the Rock—that impetuous, fiery, loving fisher-youth, Simon; and his quieter, strong, steady, reliable brother Andrew. Then came the Boanerges brothers, nicknamed the Thunderers because in their zeal they wanted to bring down fire on a wicked town; their names were James and John. With them were Philip, one of Jesus’ earliest follower-friends, and seven others.

Accompanied by this splendid band of poor, vigorous, loving peasants, Jesus came to where a great crowd of people from all over the country were waiting for Him. And, looking gladly at the Twelve, He said—

“Happy are you poor, because the kingdom of God is yours. Happy are you who are hungry now, for you shall be fed. Happy are you who weep, for you shall laugh. Be happy when men hate you and insult you. Dance for joy, for it is exactly how they treated the Prophets. Just love your enemies and forgive people who have done evil to you.”

It was not easy work following Jesus and doing what He asked. That was what fascinated strong men. He called seventy other followers to Him and told them to go out as scouts or messengers of His kingdom. They were to be pilgrim-knights, poor and brave, not fighting with armour, but ready to die for the Kingdom rather than be cowards or cruel.

They were to take a staff, but no bread, no knapsack, no money; they must wear not shoes, but sandals, and only one coat. For they were on a very urgent work and must not make their movements slow with a great deal of baggage. Besides, if a man worked, he at least deserved his food. They were not to go to a village feeling that they were beggars, but that they were taking to the place a wonderful gift. They must never be afraid if people threatened them, nor be silent just because some powerful man said he would kill them if they spoke.

Jesus called these young heroes to,

It was a challenge to their chivalry. All that was heroic in them leapt to greet the challenge and to live up to the glorious height of His appeal. Yet the yoke of the Carpenter-King was easy, for He put one end of it upon His own shoulders, shared the burden with His friends in glorious comradeship. He himself had gone through all He asked of them. So they went out two by two through lonely paths and crowded streets to teach and to heal. They had started on their Splendid Quest—the Quest of the Kingdom.

IV

One day He was seated, with His followers, speaking to a small crowd, when a band of Roman soldiers came marching up. They were fierce, strong soldiers, whose whole life and training told them to obey orders at all costs. They had come, with shining armour and clanking swords, to take Jesus prisoner. They had received their orders to do so from the court of justice. When they came to where He was they saw a poor roughly-dressed Countryman. Around Him were the group of young men who followed Him, and some working people from the poorer streets of Jerusalem.

Jesus was speaking. When their captain cried “Halt!” the soldiers, moved by something wonderful in His gesture and speech, stood waiting till He had finished. With gentle simplicity and strong dignity He told them of His kingdom of Love, where the poor, sinning woman, the tired, starving prodigal son, and the despised tax-gatherer would come in the spirit of little children in tender comradeship and holy worship to live beautiful lives full of overflowing joy. In that kingdom the children would play at weddings and funerals and would never quarrel, while all proud anger and crying would cease.

The proud Roman captain bowed his head. In quiet, muffled words he said to his soldiers, “Right about turn!” So they marched back to the court of justice.

“Well!” said the judge. “Where is He? Have you brought Him?”

“Never man spake like this One,” said the Roman captain.

The judge sneered at him, but he was a brave soldier to face the jeers of the judge and the court rather than take the defenceless Peasant prisoner.

Some time later, Jesus and His men walked along the road, while a crowd followed them; and they met some tired poor women, most of them holding a baby in one arm and leading a little boy with the other.

One of the mothers came up to a disciple and said—

“We want the Great Physician to bless our little ones,” pointing to the babies and the boys.

“Oh, you musn’t,” said the angry disciple. “Go away. He is the Messiah. He cannot be bothered with little things like this. Besides, He is tired.”

Jesus turned to see what was happening. “You must not forbid them,” He said. “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” He sat down and took a baby upon His knee, while His arm was round a boy who stood by His side. “Of such as these is the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever does not accept the Kingdom like one of these will never enter it.”

Then the tender look went from His face, and His mouth looked stern as He said—

“Whoever makes one of these least stumble, it would be better that a millstone were hung on his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Again the loving look came back to His face as He smiled in the faces of the children and the disciples and said—

“But if you welcome little ones like these, for My sake, you welcome Me—and in welcoming Me you welcome Him that sent Me.”

The mothers went home with singing hearts to put their children to bed. The Wonderful Teacher had blessed them.

Jesus walked on and on, ever southward through the dark night, to face snarling priests and cruel soldiers, the scourge, the cruel crown of thorns, and the Roman gallows.

But boys with rosy olive cheeks stirred in their sleep on their little couches, and they smiled as they prattled in their dreams—

“. . . little children . . . come unto Me . . . the kingdom of heaven.”

V

It is a thing that will make all boys proud and glad to remember that in that last week of Jesus’ life—amid the treason and cowardice of disciples, the brutal mockery of Roman soldiers, and the crafty cruelty of priests—the one brave sound of praise to Jesus in Jerusalem came from boys. It was easy for the people to shout His praises in the country roads. It was not easy in the very Temple itself, with the priests ready to grumble at them, and only waiting for an opportunity to kill Jesus Himself. So it made His face shine with gladness that the boys in the Temple sang out boldly and clearly, “Hosanna, hail, Son of David.”

The priests came grumbling to them—

“Why don’t You stop those boys making that noise! Do you hear what they are saying?”

“Yes,” answered Jesus firmly, “I do hear. Now let Me ask, Have you never heard—you people who know all the Law—have you never heard this: ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast made perfect praise’?”

“Woe to you,” cried the Voice in stern wrath and utter condemnation. It was the voice of Him who had lovingly welcomed the children. Now it was raised in withering scorn that swept the hearers before it like autumn leaves before a gale. “Woe to you,” cried Jesus, as He stood on the terrace of the Temple. “Teachers and Pharisees, play-actors, humbugs, you will not go into the kingdom, and you will not let any one else go in. You whitewashed graves, outwardly pure, but inwardly full of rottenness. You slaughterers of the prophets whom you flog and kill. How can you escape condemnation?”

For three years they had schemed and planned, opposing Him at every point. Cowards as they were, they dared not take Him prisoner because the people loved Him and would defend Him. So with mean tricks and spiteful plans, first with soft words and then with soldiers, they tried to lead Him to His death.

Now the cruel ring of enemies was closing round Him. And from the strong ring of His closest friends came the last blow. The priests were scheming how to achieve His death. They could not do it in the day because they were afraid of the people. And Jesus never slept the night in a walled city. They must take Him by being led to His evening resting place. As they schemed there came to them a man with nervous clutching hands and an evil face. It was Judas.

“I will lead you to Him at night.”

“For how much?” they asked.

“For thirty pieces of silver,” he replied, with a gleam of greed in his eyes.

It was the price of a slave.

That evening Jesus met with His disciples in an upper room for the Passover supper.

When Jesus had washed His own hands He came to where His disciples sat. He had wound a towel round Himself like a slave. He stooped and washed their feet. “Do to each other,” He said, “as I do to you.”

Then they sat down, while before them was the paste of crushed fruits and vinegar which was to recall to their mind the mortar with which their forefathers had made bricks in Egypt.

“The hand of the traitor is even at the supper of comrades,” came the voice of Jesus.

“Who is it?” they cried.

Jesus whispered to John, who was closest, “It is the one to whom I shall give this bread when I have dipped it in the vinegar-paste.”

In a few moments shuddering, cowering, wretched Judas had eaten the sop and gone from the supper. Jesus was left with the others to tell them to love one another as He had loved them, and to remember Him as they took bread and wine together when He had gone.

“Trouble will come to you,” He said; “in the world.”

And He told them of the Quest for the Kingdom of Love. “Do not be troubled,” He said, “for I have wrestled. I have achieved the Quest—mine is the Conquest of the World.”

He and His friends went out into the night and into the Garden of Gethsemane. Through the darkness came the murky glow of torches and the clash of arms. Jesus stood to receive the band who approached Him.

“Whom do you seek?” He asked.

“Jesus of Nazareth,” answered the captain.

“I am He.”

But they shrank back before the majesty of His love. Then they recovered themselves, and taking Him prisoner, marched with Him to Annas’ house, where Jesus was asked some questions while the Sanhedrin was hurriedly gathered in the night. They then led Him to the Hall of Hewn Stone to Caiaphas, the High Priest. Jesus there faced the snarling priests in the Justice Court of the Sanhedrin with unmoved daring, and in answer to the repeated questions of Caiaphas, declared, “I am the Christ.”

For saying that, they called Him liar and blasphemer of God. He stood there in calm power, He who had raised the dead and healed the sick, while those blind brutal bullies who called themselves the servants of God spat in His sacred face, blindfolded Him, smote Him with their hands and let the vile soldiers beat Him with rods, jeering, “Now, prophet, guess who smote thee.”

To stand there in unbroken dignity and kingly power while they broke their strength on Him was higher than heroism.

Dawn began to light in the east, and Jesus was led from the palace of the High Priest Caiaphas, to that in which Pontius Pilate, the Governor, stayed when in Jerusalem.

As He walked across, Jesus heard the last stuttering curses of His boastful-brave disciple Peter, saying, “I never knew the Man.”

To the sound of that awful denial the undaunted Jesus passed on to the marble Roman hall to look into the cruel, careless face of Pilate. At the same time the Sanhedrin priests passed out to the Temple Court. There a figure of horror met them. A man frenzied and haggard, with wild, sleepless, bloodshot eyes. He stood before them shrieking—

“I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.”

It was Judas.

“What is that to us?” sneered the haughty priests, drawing their skirts about them and passing on.

With a mad, despairing gesture he hurled the thirty clanging pieces of silver on the marble floor and fled—out, anywhere, anywhere to escape the awful vision of his Great Leader and Comrade condemned to the gallows.

Meanwhile Jesus stood before Pilate. The proud Roman governor for once looked into a Face of wondrous dignity that moved even him to a touch of awe.

Pilate looked at the calm face and brave eyes.

“Are you the King of the Jews?”

“My kingdom is not of this world,” came the answer.

“Then you are a King.”

Pilate led Him out. “I see no fault in Him,” began the governor. But a howl of disappointed fury went up, and a shouting of accusations.

Pilate was perplexed. Then his ear caught the word “Galilee.”

“Galilee—then He is under Herod’s rule. Let Herod judge Him.”

Before that crafty fox, Herod (the shifty, coarse brute who had cut off the head of John the Baptist), Jesus stood in a silence that was awful in its scorn.

“Bring a robe from my old chest,” shouted the loathsome King. So they dressed Him up as a mock king. But through all the hideous revelry and jeering His unbroken courage and mighty power shone as with simple strength He walked back to Pilate.

Pilate again declared that he saw no fault in Jesus.

“Let me scourge Him and release Him.”

The brutal soldiers took Jesus and bound Him. They stripped the mock-royal robe and His own simple linen dress from His back. Then a brawny soldier, baring his right arm, took up a many-thonged whip loaded with balls of lead and pieces of sharp bone and brought down the cruel lash again and again on His bleeding back.

Again they put Herod’s purple robe on Him; on His head they crushed a cruel crown of thorns; in His hand they put a reed as mock sceptre. They spat in His face and slapped His cheeks with their open hands.

Surely the sight must move the pity of the crowd of priests and wastrels as Jesus, still erect, but pale, and with His strong tender face bruised and His forehead spotted with blood, walked out. But no, the cry came from their mad throats, “Crucify Him; crucify Him.”

“Then, therefore, Pilate handed Him over to them to be crucified.”

From a pile of gibbets, the soldiers lifted one and placed it on His bleeding shoulder to carry through the streets and up the Hill. Through all the trial Jesus had never flinched. He took His cross and carried it to the gate of the city, but the cruel thongs of the whip had done their work. Fainting under the load, He fell, and a Jew from North Africa took up the cross and carried it to the top of the Hill. The priests were exultant. Only the women and children wept. In all His suffering Jesus heard them, and now He said—

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me. Weep for these boys and girls of yours, and for what they shall suffer.”

At the top of the Hill they stripped Him and the soldiers snatched His clothes. They laid the cross on the earth and Jesus on the cross, hammering nails through His outstretched hands. Brave to the end, He refused the drug that they offered Him; tender to the end, He said of His cruel torturers—

“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

For six hours He hung in agony. At last came the triumph cry, “It is finished.”

The friends of Jesus buried Him under the starry sky and rolled a stone across the mouth of the sepulchre.

Then Peter and his friends, unable to rest, fished all night in the lake.

“Comrades,” a Voice rang through the mist of the morning. “Have you any fish?”

“No,” came the answer from the men.

“Throw out on the other side.”

Then it was full of fish. In a flash Peter understood and had hurled himself into the water. The others followed. It was Jesus who had risen from the grave. He had conquered even death. There on the beach, like the old camping-days, the Comrades sat to breakfast. His last words that morning were the first words that He had uttered to them on that shore three years before: “Follow Me.”

Later they were together with Him on the mountain and He was taken up from their sight. He was taken from them. Yet the wondrous Hero has never really left His followers.

Every hero and every heroine in these stories of the Quest has known for very truth the promise that He made—

“Where two or three come together in My name, there am I.”

“I am with you all the days.”

The heroes and heroines—Galahad, Louis, and Joan d’Arc, Peter and Paul, Abraham Lincoln and Sister Dora—all followed the splendid Quest of the perfect life. Jesus was their Quest, for He alone has lived a perfect life. They followed along the Pilgrims’ Way which He had first walked. But they triumphed because He—the hero of Heroes—had first walked that Way and gained the victory.

Theirs was the Quest: His was the Splendid Conquest.

“I have wrestled with the world,” He said, “and I have the Conquest.”

We can follow the Quest too with Him. Where two or three boys or girls walk the Pilgrims’ Way, there is our Hero and Saviour, Jesus. We shall win—with Him. “This,” He said, “is the Victory over the World; even your Faith.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

[The end of The Splendid Quest by Basil Mathews]