His library consisted of five books which he valued beyond anything he possessed, chiefly on account of what was in them and what he got out of them; to some extent also, in the case of three of them, for what they represented to him.

The first was a very large Bible bound in massive leather-covered boards, a present from Master Claude Gray to his friend, and brother in Christ, Philip Carre, and so stated in a very fine round-hand on the front page.  It contained a number of large pictures drawn on wood which, under strict injunctions as to carefulness and clean hands and no wet fingers, I was occasionally allowed to look at on a winter’s Sabbath evening, and which always sent me to bed in a melancholy frame of mind, yet drew me to their inspection with a most curious fascination when the next chance offered.

Another was Mr. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, also with woodcuts of a somewhat terrifying aspect, yet not devoid of lively fillips to the imagination.

Then there was a truly awful volume, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with pictures which wrought so upon me that I used to wake up in the night shrieking with terror, and my mother forbade any further study of it; though Krok, when he came to be able to read, would hang over it by the hour, spelling out all the dreadful stories with his big forefinger and noting every smallest detail of the pictured tortures.

These two my grandfather had bought in Peter Port at a sale, together with a copy of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables Choisies in French, with delightful pictures of all the talking beasts.

And—­crowning glory from the purely literary point of view—­a massive volume of Plays by William Shakespeare, and to this was attached a history and an inscription of which my grandfather, in his quiet way, was not a little proud.

When the Valentine, East Indiaman, went ashore on Brecqhou in the great autumn gale, the year before I was born,—­that was before the Le Marchants set themselves down there,—­my grandfather was among the first to put out to the rescue of the crew and passengers.  He got across to Brecqhou at risk of his life, and, from his knowledge of that ragged coast and its currents, managed to float a line down to the sinking ship by means of which every man got safe ashore.  There was among them a rich merchant of London, a Mr. Peter Mulholland, and he would have done much for the man who had saved all their lives.

“I have done naught more than my duty,” said my grandfather, and would accept nothing.

But Mr. Mulholland stopped with him for some days, while such of the cargo as had floated was being gathered from the shores—­and, truth to tell, from the houses—­of Sercq, that is to say some portion of it, for some went down with the ship, and in some of the houses there are silken hangings to this day.  And the rich Englishman came to know what manner of man my grandfather was and his tastes, and some time after he had gone there came one day a great parcel by the Guernsey cutter, addressed to my grandfather, and in it was that splendid book of Shakespeare’s Plays which, after his Bible, became his greatest delight.  An inscription, too, which he read religiously every time he opened the book, though he must have known every curl of every letter by heart.