lly looked that his hard hands were quite clean, he opened it with
the greatest reverence. James Fern had only begun to teach the boy to
read a few months before, when he felt the first fatal symptoms of his
illness; and Stephen, with his few opportunities for learning, had only
mastered one chapter, the fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, which
his father had chosen for him to begin with. The sick man lay still with
closed eyes, but listening attentively to every word, and correcting his
son whenever he made any mistake. When it was finished, James Fern read a
few verses aloud himself, with low voice and frequent pauses to regain
his strength; and very soon afterwards the whole family were in a deep
sleep, except himself.

CHAPTER III.

STEPHEN'S FIRST VICTORY.

James Fern did not live many more days, and he was buried the Sunday
following his death. All the colliers and pitmen from Botfield walked
with the funeral of their old comrade and made a great burial of it. The
parish church was two miles on the other side of Botfield, and four miles
from Fern's Hollow; so James Fern and his family had never, as he called
it, 'troubled' the church with their attendance. All the household, even
to little Nan, went with their father's corpse, to bury it in the strange
and distant churchyard. Stephen felt as if he was in some long and
painful dream, as he sat in the cart, with his feet resting upon his
father's coffin, with his grandfather on a chair at the head, nodding
and laughing at every jolt on the rough road, and Martha holding a
handkerchief up to her face, and carrying a large umbrella over herself
and little Nan, to keep the dust off their new black bonnets. The boy,
grave as he was, could hardly think; he felt in too great a maze for
that. The church, too, which he had never entered before, seemed grand
and cold and immense, with its lofty arches, and a roof so high that it
made him giddy to look up to it. Now and then he heard a few sentences of
the burial service sounding out grandly in the clergyman's strange, deep
voice; but they were not words he was familiar with, and he could not
understand their meaning. At the open grave only, the clergyman said 'Our
Father,' which his father had taught him during his illness; and while
his tears rolled down his cheeks for the first time that day, Stephen
repeated over and over again to himself, 'Our Father! our Father!'

Stephen would have liked to stay in the c