you not there too?"

"At Bristol with father," replied Jeph.

"Worse luck for you. The red coat shot the big angel right in the eye,
and shivered him through, and we did the rest with stones. I sent one
that knocked the wing of him right off. You should have seen me, Stead!
And old Clerk North was running about crying all the time like a baby.
He'll never whack us over the head again!"

"What was the good?" said Steadfast.

"You never saw better sport," said the boys.

And indeed, since, when once begun, destruction and mischief are apt to
be only too delightful to boys, they had thoroughly and thoughtlessly
delighted in knocking down the things they had been taught to respect. A
figure of a knight in a ruff kneeling on a tomb had had its head
knocked off, and one of the lads heaved the bits up to throw at the last
fragment of glass in the window.

"What do you do that for?" asked Stead.

"'Tis worshipping of idols," said a somewhat graver lad. "'Break down
their idols,' the man in the black gown said, 'and burn their graven
images in the fire.'"

"But we never worshipped them," said Stead.

"Pious preacher said so," returned the youth, "and mighty angered was
he with the rails." (Jeph and Will were sparring with two fragments of
them.) "'Down with them,' he cried out, so as it would have done your
heart good to hear him."

"And the parson is gone! There will be no hearing the catechism on
Sundays!" cried Ralph Wilkes, making a leap over the broken font.

"Good luck for you, Ralph," cried the others. "You, that never could
tell how many commandments there be."

"Put on your hat, Stead," called out another lad. "We've done with all
that now, and the parson is gone to prison for it."

"No, no," shouted Tom Oates, "'twas for making away with the Communion
things."

"I heard the red coat say they had a warrant against scandalous
ministers," declared Ralph Wilkes.

"I heard the man with the pen and ink-horn ask for the popish vessels,
as he called them, and not a word would the parson say," said Oates.

"I'd take my oath he has hid them somewheres," replied Jack Beard, an
ill-looking lad.

"What a windfall they would be for him as found them!" observed Wilkes.

"I'd like to look over the parsonage house," said Jeph.

"No use. Old dame housekeeper has locked herself in, as savage as a bear
with a sore head."

"Besides, they did turn over all the parson's things and made a bonfire
of all his popish bo