Buz shook his bushy head. "They don't have synagogues in these parts. The master calls us in and reads to us on the Sabbath; but I always get sleepy when I sit right still, and so I generally get behind somebody and go to sleep. The shepherds talk to each other a good deal about such things, I am never with them though. I spend all my time running errands."
Shocked at such ignorance, Joel began to tell the shepherd king's life with such eloquence that Buz stopped short in the road to listen.
Seeing this the donkey stood still also, wagged its one ear, and went to sleep. But Buz listened, wider awake than he had ever been before in his life.
The story was a favorite one with Joel, and he put his whole soul into it.
"Who told you that?" asked Buz, taking a long breath when the interesting tale was finished.
"Why I read it myself!" answered Joel.
"Oh, can you read?" asked Buz, looking at Joel in much the same way that Joel had looked at him after he killed the hawk. "I do not see how anybody can. It puzzles me how people can look at all those crooked black marks and call them rivers and flocks and things. I looked one time, just where Master had been reading about a great battle. And I didn't see a single thing that looked like a warrior or a sword or a battle-axe, though he called them all by name. There were several little round marks that might have been meant for sling-stones; but it was more than I could make out, how he could get any sense out of it."
Joel leaned back and laughed till the hills rang, laughed till the tears stood in his eyes, and the donkey waked up and ambled on.
Buz did not seem to be in the least disturbed by his merriment, although he was puzzled as to its cause. He only stooped to pick up more stones for his sling as they went on.