"'Tis indeed a grave question, and I will strive to explain the matter to you another day. Meantime, my son, attend to me. As I tell you, the lives of your father and mother depend upon your discretion. If you speak of what you have found out to any one, you may expect to see us burned alive at the stake. Do you know what that means?'" "I did know, only too well. Only a year before, I had played the truant to see some great sight, I knew not what, which had drawn together a crowd of people over there on the border of the waste. I had slipped between them till I reached the front rank, and I had never forgotten the sight which met my eyes—the body of an aged woman consuming in the flames. The sight and the smell had haunted my dreams at times ever since." "'I never will betray you, dear father; never,' I cried passionately. 'I will never breathe one word, if only you will let me hear God's Word.'" "From that time, I was a regular attendant at the evening readings, nor would I have missed them for any reward which could have been promised me. My mother could repeat whole chapters of the Scripture, especially of the New Testament, and she caused me to learn them also; for she said—" "'You may not always have the book. It may be destroyed, or you may have to leave home, but what is stored in your memory no man can take from you.'" "Accordingly, she caused me to learn by heart large part of the sayings of our Lord, with the account of his miracles." "Did our Lord work miracles like the holy image at Glastonbury, or like those we read of in the lives of the saints?" asked Jack. "Was he seen gliding along over the treetops, or kneeling a little way up in the air at his devotions, like St. Catherine; or did he live a whole week on five orange seeds, like St. Rose; or—" "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."