When he awoke the room was no longer filled with sunshine. A single candle lantern was burning at the farther end of the cell and by its light he could see his father, Jan Kanty, and his mother busied with something that lay in front of them upon the table. He rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was awake—yes, it was the mysterious pumpkin from which his father was slicing away the outer rind with a huge knife. It was a curious pumpkin, that vegetable—the rind was so hard and brittle that the knife scraped on it as if it were cutting or whittling away a piece of board. Joseph, fascinated, watched the process, almost afraid to breathe. Little by little the hard pieces dropped to the floor like bits of shell as the blade cut them through. “I think,” the father was saying in a low voice, “that I hold here in my hand the reason for the attack on my house in the Ukraine, and that the man who has hounded us to-day knew very well what this pumpkin shell contained. He had been told that I had it in my possession; he knew the exact size of my property, and he quickly put two and two together when he saw this pumpkin, and only this pumpkin, in my wagon. The reason that I made no effort to conceal it was, of course, to allay any suspicion concerning it.” “But,” interrupted Jan Kanty, “a pumpkin at this time of year is likely to create some curiosity among those who give the matter a second thought. This is a late pumpkin, and I suppose that in all Poland it would be hard to find another such in midsummer.” “True,” replied Pan Andrew, “but I had to risk that. Long ago when I was worried over this sacred charge and feared lest some enemy might discover its existence and attempt to rob me, there came to me the idea of a shell like this as an excellent means of concealment. Since that day there has never been a time, summer or winter, when there was not a pumpkin shell in readiness for an emergency, and many an experiment was I obliged to make, indeed, before I was able to preserve a shell in the good condition of this one.” At this moment he cut away the last piece of the rind. The room was suddenly filled with the light of a thousand candles. Colors of the rainbow fell upon the walls—a huge center of radiance like the sun in the heavens blazed into being at the very place where the pumpkin shell had been but a moment before. Flickering, dancing flecks of light leaped about the room and transformed its gloom into the brilliancy of day—and then there was again but the light of the little lantern, for the father had placed that which the pumpkin contained in a bag furnished by Jan Kanty, and was busy tying up the open side when Joseph came rushing up to the table. “Father,” he cried, “what was it? What was the light which came from that which you took from the pumpkin?”