Tommy.
The next journey of the Club was indeed en zigzag.
“I have allowed you to visit,” said Master Lewis to the boys, “the places to which your reading has led your curiosity, most of which places I have visited before. I now wish to take you to a ruin that I have never seen, and of which you may have never heard. It is the place where, according to tradition, Christianity was first established in Great Britain; where St. Patrick is said to have preached, and where he was buried. It is the place which poetry associates with the mission and miracles of Joseph of Arimathæa; here his staff, in the shape of the white thorn, is said to blossom every Christmas.”
“Glastonbury Abbey,” said Ernest Wynn. “Of course there can be no truth in the tradition of Joseph of Arimathæa and the White Thorn?”
“The story of Joseph’s mission to England, his burial here, and his blooming staff,” said Master Lewis, “is undoubtedly a fiction, like the legend which claims that the stone in the old Scottish Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey is the one on which Jacob rested when he saw the vision of angels. But Glastonbury Abbey was possibly the first Church in England. Here were the monuments of King Arthur, King Edmund, and King Edgar; and even old King Coel, St. David, and St. Dunstan are said to have been buried here.”
“What! the St. Dunstan that the devil tried to tempt?” asked Tommy.
“The St. Dunstan that the devil did tempt, I fear,” said Master Lewis.
“I would like to hear the story of his temptations,” said Tommy, “as we are going to Glastonbury.”
THE STORY OF ST. DUNSTAN’S TEMPTATION.
“St. Dunstan,” said Master Lewis, “was Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, and was a very ambitious man.