"Nay, our Lord's miracles were very different from most of those related in the lives of the saints," replied the shepherd. "They were mostly performed to heal the sick, or to help those who were in some strait for want of food, or the like. But at last, the time came when I must go forth to seek my own living. My father was not rich, and had suffered, like almost every one else, by the long civil wars. So I was sent to keep sheep on the Stonehill farm, across the waste yonder, and quite on the other side of the parish. I did not come home for a year, and then it was upon a mournful occasion. My father had been arrested and thrown into jail for a heretic, and though my good master, Sir John Brydges, interceded for him, he could not save him. My brother was obliged to flee for his life, and what became of him I cannot say. I never saw or heard of him again."
"I was permitted to see my father and receive his blessing, but only in presence of witnesses. His enemies would gladly have pushed matters to extremity, and have turned my mother and me out into the world to wander as beggars, if indeed they had left us that resource, but again Sir John stood our friend. May God bless him for it, and give him his portion among the saints! He was a man of weight and power, and he used his power well. The cottage where my father and grandfather lived was assured to my mother for her life, and I was taken into the good knight's service, he thinking, I suppose, that I should be safer attending upon him."
"I followed his fortunes faithfully for more than forty years, and I supported his head when he died. His son, the present knight, has ever been kind to me. He would have given me a home in his own hall had I desired it, but I was ever a lover of solitude, and found more pleasure in following the sheep on the hillside than in sitting among the servants in the great hall. Besides, I have always cherished a secret hope that I might find my father's great book hidden somewhere about the old cottage."
"Then it was not destroyed?" said Jack.
"Not that I know of. It was never found. My father, fearing for its safety, had bestowed it in some new hiding-place the day that he was arrested, and he had no time to tell my mother where he had placed it."
"Then it may be in being now," said Jack. "Oh, uncle, if we could but find it!"
"Would to God I might!" replied the old man, looking upward and clasping his hands. "I would depart in peace, could I but once more hold the Word of God in my hands. And, son Jack—for dear you are to me as my own son—I know not if it may not be a fond fancy, but by times something tells me that I shall see it again before I die."
[CHAPTER IV.]
SEED BY THE WAYSIDE.
From this day forward Jack had a new interest and a new object in life—to find the old Bible. Day by day, he explored every possible hiding-place, turning things upside down in all directions, and rummaging, old Margery declared, worse than a rat or than the goblin which haunted her father's barn. Over and over again, did he take the false bottom out of the little footstool, where the book had once been concealed, and gaze into the empty space, as if he thought he might somehow have overlooked the cumbrous volume, and might perhaps find it by more careful search.