"If it is Our Lord," I said to myself, "then surely I must give Him something. If I go home now, so that mother comes and looks out and sees me and tells me how the matter stands, He might be gone in the meantime; and that would be disgraceful and ridiculous. I think it is He beyond a doubt: the one whom the horseman met looked just like that."
I went a few steps back and began to tear at my grey jacket. It was no easy work: the coat fitted so tightly over my coarse linen shirt; and I did not want to be puffing and panting, lest the beggar-man should notice me too soon. I had a yellow-handled pocket-knife, brand-new and just lately sharpened. I took it out of my pocket, put the little coat under my knee and began to divide it down the middle.
It was soon done and I stole up to the beggar-man, who seemed to be half asleep, and put his part of my coat on his head:
"Take this, my needy brother!" I said, silently, in my thoughts.
Then I put my half of the coat under my arm, gazed at Our Lord a little longer and then drove the sheep from the walk.
"He is sure to come in the night," I thought, "and then father and mother will see Him and, if He wishes to stop with us, we can fit up the back room and the little altar for Him."
I lay in the cupboard-bedstead, beside father and mother, and I could not sleep. The night passed and He Whom I was expecting did not come.
But, early in the morning, when the barn-door cock crowed the men and maids out of their beds and when the noisy working-day began in the yard outside, an old man—he was nicknamed Mushroom Moses—came to my father, brought him the piece of my jacket which I had given away and told how I had wantonly cut it the evening before and flung one half at his head as he was taking a rest on the sheep-walk after hunting for mushrooms.
Thereupon my father came up softly to my bed, with one hand hidden behind his back.
"Look here, lad, just you tell me what you've done with your new Sunday jacket!"