Jack\'s Ward
JACK'S WARD CHAPTER I JACK HARDING GETS A JOB "Look here, boy, can you hold my horse a few minutes?" asked a gentleman, as he jumped from his carriage in one of the lower streets in New York. The boy addressed was apparently about twelve, with a bright face and laughing eyes, but dressed in clothes of coarse material. This was Jack Harding, who is to be our hero. "Yes, sir," said Jack, with alacrity, hastening to the horse's head; "I'll hold him as long as you like."
Some sixteen hundred years ago, so tradition tells, there lived in the
South of Ireland a very holy man named Piran. Such was his piety that
he was able to perform miracles. Once he fed ten Irish kings and their
armies for ten days on end with three cows. Men sorely wounded in battle
were brought to him to be cured, and he cured them. Yet the Irish grew
jealous of his power and decided he must be killed.
And so one stormy, boisterous morning the pious Piran was brought in
chains to the summit of a high cliff, and with a huge millstone tied to
his neck his ungrateful neighbours hurled him into the raging billows
beneath. This horrible deed was marked, as the holy man left the top of
the cliff, with a blinding flash of lightning and a terrifying crash of
thunder, and then, to the amazement of the savages who had thus sought
to destroy him, a wonderful thing happened.
As man and millstone reached the sea the storm instantly ceased. The sun
shone out, the waves and the wind died down, and, peering over the edge
of the cliff, the wondering crowd saw the holy man, seated peacefully
upon a floating millstone, drifting slowly away in the direction of the
Cornish shore, some hundreds of miles to the south-east.
St. Piran's millstone bore him safely across the Atlantic waves until at
length--on the fifth day of March--it grounded gently upon the Cornish
coast, between Newquay and Perranporth, on that glorious stretch of sand
known to-day as Perran Beach. Here the Saint landed, and, taking his
JACK'S WARD CHAPTER I JACK HARDING GETS A JOB "Look here, boy, can you hold my horse a few minutes?" asked a gentleman, as he jumped from his carriage in one of the lower streets in New York. The boy addressed was apparently about twelve, with a bright face and laughing eyes, but dressed in clothes of coarse material. This was Jack Harding, who is to be our hero. "Yes, sir," said Jack, with alacrity, hastening to the horse's head; "I'll hold him as long as you like."