At last the rose and silver of the dawn flushed the sky. Day had come and along that lonesome road came the first traveller in all the hours of Peter's vigil. A clergyman whose night had been spent by the bedside of a sick parishioner, hurrying homeward on the path beside the dyke, heard a groan, a feeble sound of one in mortal agony. Turning, he glanced, first here and there, and looking up, at last, he saw beside the dyke, the figure of a child writhing in agony. In a single bound, the clergyman stood beside him exclaiming: "In the name of wonder, boy, what are you doing here?" "I am keeping the water from running out," said Peter. "Oh, can't you ask them to come _quick_." And they did. The town of Haarlem, even Holland itself, had been saved, through the courage of a little boy who did his duty, and from that day to this there has never been a child in Holland who has not heard the stirring story of Peter, whose pluck was worthy of a sluicer's son, and whose name will never be forgotten, or effaced from the page of historic legend. DAVID: The Shepherd Boy A rare good fortune it is to have a friend so true and so faithful that it is as safe to tell him a secret as to whisper it to yourself, one to whom your interests are as important as his own, and who would do any sort of unselfish act to show his devotion to you. It was just such a comradeship as this which existed between two boys of long ago, the story of whose intimacy has come down to us from Bible times as a most wonderful example of what a friendship can be. Those boys were David, the son of Jesse of Bethlehem, and Jonathan, the son of Saul, King of Israel, and when you hear two persons spoken of as "a David and a Jonathan" you may know that they are the closest kind of friends. To appreciate thoroughly the friendship between David and Jonathan, and what it meant to both of them, let us go back a little into the history of the time in which the boys lived, and look at the circumstances which led up to their friendship, for that is very important to a clear understanding of the story of David and Jonathan.