ll all the way to Peter
Port, a good fourteen miles there and back, for the purpose of meeting his
friend, and looked on it as a high privilege.

When, at times, he took me with him, I, too, looked on it as a mighty
privilege; for Peter Port, even on a Sabbath morning, was, to a boy whose
life was spent within the shadow of the Autelets, so to speak, a great and
bustling city, full of people and houses and mysteries, and of course of
wickedness, all of which excited my liveliest imaginings.

In the evening we would pull back, or run before the west wind if it
served, and my grandfather would thoughtfully con over the gains of the day
as another might tell the profits of his trading. Master Claude Gray was a
man of parts, well read, an Englishman, and it was doubtless from him that
my grandfather drew some of that love of books which distinguished him
above any man I ever knew on Sercq, not excepting even the Seigneur, or the
Senechal, or the Schoolmaster, or the Parson.

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