Name: Master Simon's Garden

CONTENTS:

-

PART I - MARGERET-

I. THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
II.-MASTER SIMON'S PILGRIMAGE
III.-ROOFS OF GOLD
IV. THE GOSPEL OF FEAR
V.-BY CANDLELIGHT
VI.-THE SCHOOLHOUSE LANE
VII.-GOODY PARSONS ON GUARD

PART II - STEPHEN

VIII. A TALE OF WITCHES
IX.-KING JAMES' TREE
X. "SHIPS OF ADVENTURE"
XI. FAIR MAIDS OF FRANCE
XII. THE BREAKING OF THE STORM
XIII. LIGHTING THE FIREBRAND
XIV. COUSIN BETSEY ANNE
XV. A MESSAGE FROM MASTER SIMON
XVI. THE HAND ON THE LATCH
XVII. PRISONER OF WAR
XVIII. QUAKER LADIES
XIX. GOODY PARSONS' ROSE
XX. THE SEA-ROAD TO CATHAY

CONCLUSION

***

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

Margaret loved them too- - Frontispiece
"You shall not cut down our tree"
He drew his shining sword and held it up
"Why are you not watching, Mother?"

a selection from PART I - MARGERET - CHAPTER I

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

!-- 3-16: Janet Keller --OLD Goody Parsons, with her cleanest white kerchief, her most sorrowful expression of face and her biggest brown basket, had gone down through the village and across the hill to tell Master Simon what a long, hard winter it had been and how her cupboard was as bare, indeed, as Mother Hubbard's own. Now, as she made her way up the stony path again, her wrinkled old face was wreathed in smiles and her burden sagged heavily from her arm, for once more it had been proved that no one who came hungry to Master Simon's door ever went away unsatisfied. He had piled her basket high with good things from his garden, his wife had added three loaves of freshly baked bread and a jar of honey, and his little daughter Margeret had walked part of the way up the hill to help the old woman on her homeward road.

"Good-bye to you, little Mistress," Goody Parsons called after her when they parted at last, "and may the blessings on your dear father and mother be as many as are the good gifts in my basket."

Margeret, since her father needed her, did not wait to reply, but scampered away down the path again. The old woman stood on the hill-crest looking down at the scattered houses of the little Puritan town, at the spreading, sloping meadows and the wide salt marshes growing yellow-green under the pleasant April sunshine.

"These hills and meadows will never look as fair to me as those of England," she sighed, "but after all it is a goodly land that we have come to. Even if there be hunger and cold and want in it, are there not also freedom and kindness and Master Simon?"

The little town of Hopewell had been established long enough to have passed by those first terrible years when suffering and starvation filled the New England Colonies. There were, however, many hard lessons to be learned before those who knew how to live and prosper in the Old World could master the arts necessary to the keeping of body and soul together in the New. Men who had tilled the rich smooth fields of England and had followed the plough down the furrows that their great-grandfathers had trod before them, must now break out new farm lands in those boulder-strewn meadows that sloped steeply down to the sea. Grievous work they surely found it, and small the returns for the first hard years. Yet, whenever food or fire or courage failed, the simplest remedy in the world for every trouble was to go in haste to Master Simon Radpath. His grassy meadow was always green, his fields rich every harvest time with bowing grain, his garden always crowded with herbs and vegetables, and gay the whole summer long with flowers, scarlet and white and yellow.