CHAPTER II.

THE LESSON.


"Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, think ye...."

Many and many an hour had Peter spent, when he was a very little boy, in
gazing through the heavy banister-like railings of the gallery; and, as
he grew older, in pensively leaning upon them, and longing in vain to
get into the forbidden Paradise of the garden. The gallery floor being
about twelve feet from the ground he could see the whole place from it.
Oh the stores of nests that it must contain! the beautiful sharp sticks
for arrows! the capital elder shoots, full of pith! how he longed to get
at them for making pop-guns! Sometimes, when the pink hawthorns were in
flower, or the guelder-roses, he would throw a ball at one of them just
to see what showers of bloom would come down; and then what a commotion
such an event would make among the birds! what chattering and chirping,
and screaming and fluttering! But the experiment was rather a costly
one, for the ball once thrown there was no getting it back again, it
must lie and rot till the seams burst open, and birds picked the wool
out for their nests.

Sometimes Peter would get a hook tied to the end of a long string, and
amuse himself with what he called fishing, that is to say, he would
throw out his line, and try to get it tangled in the slight branches of
some shrub, and draw it up, with a few of the flowers attached; but
with all his fishing he never got up any thing worth having: the utmost
being a torn cabbage-rose, and two or three shattered peonies, leaf and
root and all.