"Come, that's something like," said old Madam Melcombe. "Stand up now, and let me hear your Bible-lesson."
"But, grandmother," Peter inquired, "I may call this the 'field of the cloth of gold,' mayn't I?"
"O dear me, call it anything you like," she replied; "but don't stand in that way to say your task to me; put your feet together now, and fold your hands, and hold your head up. To think that you're the child's aunt, Laura, she continued fretfully, and should take no more heed to his manners. Now you just look straight at me, Peter, and begin."
The child sighed: the constraint of his attitude perhaps made him feel melancholy. He ventured to cast one glance at his fishing-rod, and at the garden, then looking straight at his great-grandmother, he began in a sweet and serious tone of voice to repeat his lesson from the twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, the third to the tenth verse.
3. "Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders.
4. "Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.
5. "And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
6. "And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.
7. "And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in.
8. "Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood unto this day.