Squib and His Friends

by Evelyn Everett-Green

“His smile is worth far more than ten thousand pieces of silver. Ah, my child, thou hast still much to learn, seeing that thou knowest not as yet thy Master.”

But the words fell on unwilling ears, and in his heart the child said, “I have no master;” and presently, while the smith worked, he crept away in the lengthening shadows, for he feared lest the good man might seek to make him his fellow-labourer at the anvil.

IV.

Days and weeks rolled by, and the child still wandered on. He met kindness from the people through whose villages he passed, and food and shelter were given him, else must he surely have died. But though his bodily needs were satisfied, a great hunger of the heart arose within him that was less easily appeased, for it seemed to him that he was quite, quite alone in the world, and that he had nothing to do—no part or lot with the busy life he ever saw about him.

The faces of the workers were happy, but his grew pale and thin. Men and boys sang at their toil, or called cheerily to one another, and the women in the houses laughed as they watched the gambols of their children, and would throw pitying glances on the toil-worn little traveller. He was never turned away from a hospitable door where he craved food or shelter, yet his loneliness grew ever greater and greater, and at last his strength began to fail him, till he ofttimes felt he could scarcely drag himself along the road. Yet he still strove to journey on, he scarce knew why, save that he feared always, if he remained in any place, that he would be made a servant by the good people who befriended him.

This was why he would not stop, though almost too ill to trail himself along, until it came to pass that one day he fell beside the road, and lay there near unto death.

Now the place where he fell was a very lonely one, hard by a great wood, and for a long while nobody passed that way, but anon there came by a man, who, when he saw the child, stopped and looked earnestly upon him, and, seeing that he was very ill, lifted him in his arms and bore him away to his own dwelling, which was in the heart of the great wood itself.

For many days the child lay upon the good man’s bed, and it seemed as though the Angel of Death hovered very near to him; yet God had mercy on the boy, and raised him up from his bed of sickness, and the care of the kind master of the house was rewarded.

Little by little the child was able to take note of the things about him, and to sit up in bed and see what went on; and that which struck him most as he watched the good man of the house was, that he was never idle. What it was that he did the child did not at first know, for he worked outside, and all the boy could hear was the ceaseless sound of tools, mingling often with the music of some song or chant which the worker would croon to himself. It sounded like carpentering work, the child thought, and as his strength returned he began to desire to go out and watch it. So one day, feeling stronger than he had done before, he rose and dressed himself, and made his way out into the sunny garden, glimpses of which he had seen all this while through the open casement of the window.

The garden was very full of flowers, which showed signs of tender care; and to the right was a carpenter’s shed, with all the tools and implements, and certain articles standing about, some only just begun, and others quite or almost finished. The master of the house was not in the shed, but sitting in his garden, and in his hands he held a great piece of wood, fashioned in the shape of a cross, upon which he was carving, with wonderful skill and fidelity to nature, a wreath of flowers, copying these from the blossoms which bloomed around him.