rs unlimited facilities for research. There Barwood was to be found
some part of every day for months.

The writer has seen a list of the works consulted by him in his singular
investigation. It numbers some hundreds, and includes commentaries of
all sorts upon the Gospels, lives of the apostles, collections of
apocryphal Gospels and Scriptural traditions, the works of the early
fathers, chronicles of the Middle Ages, treatises upon Oriental life and
customs, histories of symbolism and Christian art, a great number of
works upon numismatics, and, finally, accounts of great crimes and
calamities. For Barwood took a new view of history: he looked to find
that the great treasons, briberies, betrayals of trust, murders from
mercenary motives, and perhaps financial troubles, had been set in
motion by this fatal money, made the instrument of divine vengeance.

"It has mown a swath through history," he said, "like a discharge of
grape."

He believed it would appear, if the truth were known, in the bank
accounts of Manuel Comnenus, of Egmont, Benedict Arnold, and the
Hungarian Gorgey.

His progress was by no means rapid. Much of the literature among which
he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete
characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found
definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A
collection of apocryphal Gospels "printed," according to the quaint
title-page, "for Richard Royston at the Angle in Amen Corner, MDCLXX,"
relates particulars about Judas, among the rest, which do not appear in
the Scriptures. He was when young, it was said, a playmate of the boy
Jesus, who delivered him from a devil by which he was even then
possessed. The chief value of this book to Barwood was in a reference it
contained to a fuller Gospel of Judas Iscariot, not now extant with the
exception of some passages quoted in the writings of Irenaeus. But these
passages were upon the very subject of which he was in search. In a
treatise of Irenaeus's, therefore, of about the second century, Barwood
found the first definite mention of the coins.

The main part of the story is that of the authorized version, but after
the account of the relinquishment of the coins by Judas, saying that he
had betrayed innocent blood, and of their use in the purchase of the
potter's field, occurs a passage translated[2] by Barwood as follows:--

"Now the shekels were of the coinage of Simon