d 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._

5. _"And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed,
and went and hanged himself._