ole across the path for very joy.

"Have a care of the poor brute, friend!" he cried genially to Diccon,
whose looks were of the sulkiest. "Bring him gently on, and leave him at
Master Bucke's, near to the church."

"What do you do at Jamestown?" I asked, as we passed from out the
glade into the gloom of a pine wood. "I was told that you were gone to
Henricus, to help Master Thorpe convert the Indians."

"Ay," he answered, "I did go. I had a call,--I was sure I had a call.
I thought of myself as a very apostle to the Gentiles. I went from
Henricus one day's journey into the wilderness, with none but an Indian
lad for interpreter, and coming to an Indian village gathered its
inhabitants about me, and sitting down upon a hillock read and expounded
to them the Sermon on the Mount. I was much edified by the solemnity of
their demeanor and the earnestness of their attention, and had
conceived great hopes for their spiritual welfare, when, the reading
and exhortation being finished, one of their old men arose and made me
a long speech, which I could not well understand, but took to be one
of grateful welcome to myself and my tidings of peace and good will.
He then desired me to tarry with them, and to be present at some
entertainment or other, the nature of which I could not make out. I
tarried; and toward evening they conducted me with much ceremony to an
open space in the midst of the village. There I found planted in the
ground a thick stake, and around it a ring of flaming brushwood. To
the stake was fastened an Indian warrior, captured, so my interpreter
informed me, from some hostile tribe above the falls. His arms and
ankles were secured to the stake by means of thongs passed through
incisions in the flesh; his body was stuck over with countless pine
splinters, each burning like a miniature torch; and on his shaven crown
was tied a thin plate of copper heaped with red-hot coals. A little to
one side appeared another stake and another circle of brushwood: the one
with nothing tied to it as yet, and the other still unlit. My friend, I
did not tarry to see it lit. I tore a branch from an oak, and I became
as Samson with the jaw bone of the ass. I fell upon and smote those
Philistines. Their wretched victim was beyond all human help, but I
dearly avenged him upon his enemies. And they had their pains for naught
when they planted that second stake and laid the brush for their hell
fire. At last I dropped into the stream u