When he woke, it was in the edge of the evening.  Long shadows pointed like lances among the trees.  A horse was cropping the grass in a clearing, and some one beyond the thicket was reading aloud.  For an instant he thought himself dreaming of the old cottage at Austerfield—­but the voice was young and lightsome.

“Where a man can live at all, there can he live nobly.”

The reader stopped and laughed out.  A lively snarling came from a burrow not far away, where two badgers were quarrelling conscientiously.

“Just like folks ye be, a-hectorin’ and a-fussin’.  What’s the great question to settle now—­predestination or infant baptism?—­Why, where under the canopy did you come from, you pint o’ cider?”

“I be a-travelin’,” Will said stoutly.

“Runaway ’prentice, I should guess.  I was one myself at fifteen.”

“I’m ‘leven, goin’ on twelve,” said the boy, standing as straight as he could.

“Any folks?”

“I lived with granddad until he died, four year back.”

“And so you’re wayfarin’, be you?  What can you do to get your bread?”

The urchin dug a bare toe into the sod.  “I can work,” he said half-defiantly.  “Granddad always said I should be put to school some day, but my uncle won’t have that.  I can read.”

“Latin?”

“No—­English.  Granddad weren’t college-bred.”

“Nor I—­they gave me more lickings than Latin at the grammar school down to Alvord, ’cause I would go bird’s-nesting and fishing sooner than study my hic, haec, hoc.  And now I’ve built me a booth like a wild man o’ Virginia and come out here to get my Latin that I should ha’ mastered at thirteen.  All the travel-books are in Latin, and you have to know it to get on in foreign parts.”

“Have you been in foreign parts?”

“Four year—­France and Scotland and the Low Countries.  But I got enough o’ seeing Christians kill one another, and says I to myself, John Smith, you go see what they’re about at home.  And here I found our fen-sludgers all by the ears over Bishops and Papists and Brownists and such like.  In Holland they let a man read’s Bible in peace.”

“Is that the Bible you got there?”

“Nay—­Marcus Aurelius Antoninus—­a mighty wise old chap, if he was an Emperor.  And I’ve got Niccolo Macchiavelli’s seven books o’ the Art o’ War.  When I’m weary of one I take to t’ other, and between times I ride a tilt.”  He waved his hand toward a ring fastened on a tree, and a lance and horse-furniture leaning against the trunk.

“Our folks be Separatists,” the boy said.

“Well, and what of it?” laughed the young man.  “As I was a-reading here—­a man is what his thoughts make him.  Be he Catholic or Church Protestant or Baptist, he’s what he’s o’ mind to be, good or bad.  Other folk’s say-so don’t stop him—­no more than them badgers’ worryin’ dams the brook.”

This was a new idea to Will.  His hunger for books was so keen that it had seemed to him that without them, he would be stupid as the swine.  John Smith seemed to understand it, for he added,