“Ne’er a one,” exclaimed the nurse with zealous promptitude, “they don’t come to houses where good folks live.”

“I wish they would,” said Peter, thoughtfully, “I want to see one.”

“What does he say?” asked the great-grandmother.  The nurse repeated Peter’s audacious remark; whereupon Madam Melcombe said briskly and sharply, “Hold your tongue, child, and eat your bread and milk like a Christian; you’re spilling it on the floor.”

“But I wish they would,” repeated Peter softly; and finishing his bread and milk, he said his grace; and his fishing-rod being near at hand, he leaned his elbows on the balustrade, threw his line, and began to play at his favourite game.

“I think,” he said, presently turning to his aunt, “I think, aunt, I shall call the garden the ‘field of the cloth of gold;’ it’s so covered with marigolds just now that it looks quite yellow.  Henry’s tent shall be the arbour, and I’ll have the French king’s down in this corner.”

On hearing this, his mother slightly elevated her eyebrows, she had no notion what he was alluding to; but his grandmother, who seemed to have been made rather restless and uneasy by his remarks about ghosts, evidently regarded this talk as something more of the same sort, and said to her granddaughter, “I wish, Laura, you wouldn’t let him read such a quantity of fairy tales and heathenish nonsense—­’field o’ the cloth o’ gold, indeed!’ Who ever heard of such a thing!”

“He has only been reading the ‘History of England,’ grandmother,” said Peter’s aunt.

“I hadn’t read anything out of that book for such a long time,” said Peter; “my Bible-lesson to-day made me remember it.  About that other field, you know, grandmother.”

“Come, that’s something like,” said old Madam Melcombe.  “Stand up now, and let me hear your Bible-lesson.”

“But, grandmother,” Peter inquired, “I may call this the ’field of the cloth of gold,’ mayn’t I?”

“O dear me, call it anything you like,” she replied; “but don’t stand in that way to say your task to me; put your feet together now, and fold your hands, and hold your head up.  To think that you’re the child’s aunt, Laura, she continued fretfully, and should take no more heed to his manners.  Now you just look straight at me, Peter, and begin.”

The child sighed:  the constraint of his attitude perhaps made him feel melancholy.  He ventured to cast one glance at his fishing-rod, and at the garden, then looking straight at his great-grandmother, he began in a sweet and serious tone of voice to repeat his lesson from the twenty-seventh chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, the third to the tenth verse.

3. "Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders.

4. "Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.  And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.