"I thought you must be plotting some mischief or you would never have stuck to the work long enough to split such a pile as that," continued Dan. "There is a plot, that's a fact," returned Jack; "but it is not a Gunpowder Plot. I am going to ask father to let me go with Johnson when he goes after those cattle, and we shall be gone three days, so I thought it would advance my cause a little if the kindlings were all ready beforehand." "You are a sharp fellow," said Dan, laughing, "a very sharp fellow." "But wasn't that Gunpowder Plot a scheme though!" said Jack. "Well, I confess I don't know much about it," replied Ben, who had in his lazy fashion thrown himself on the ground. "Just tell a fellow about it and save him the trouble of reading it." "That is what Jack is aching to do," said Dan, laughing. "Jack is the orator of the family, you know." "Go ahead, old fellow," and Ben shifted his weight from one elbow to the other. "It was in the reign of James the First; he was James the Sixth of Scotland; he was the son of Mary Stuart, and as she was a Catholic, the Catholics of England supposed her son would restore, or at least tolerate, the Catholic faith in England. But they were bitterly disappointed in this expectation; the old laws against it were put into execution and others more severe passed by Parliament. And it was out of this intolerance that the famous Gunpowder Plot grew. The scheme was to blow up with gunpowder the Parliament House, while Parliament was in session, and so destroy the king and members of Parliament. There was a vault under the building which the conspirators hired as a salesroom for wood and coal. They put in stealthily thirty-six barrels of gunpowder and then covered these with the wood and prepared a train so that the whole could be fired at once. They had a ship ready to take Fawkes on board--" "You've got ahead of your story! tell us who was Fawkes." "He was one of the conspirators, a Spanish officer who superintended the business and was to touch it off. Authorities do not quite agree as to how the secret leaked out. It is supposed that one of the conspirators wanted to save some of his friends and so warned them to keep away from the Parliament House on the day set for the execution of the plot, and suspicion was thus aroused, and Guy Fawkes was arrested just as he was about to apply the match to the train. He was tried and executed along with several others. The day set for the horrible deed was the fifth of November, 1605, and it has ever since been observed as a holiday in England." "You've done well," said Dan. "But you left out a lot; you forgot to tell how they first hired a house next to the place where Parliament was held and tried to dig through the walls."