The Pilgrim Read Online Free PDF

door. I did not sing those pagan songs. But I listened to the music of the pipes and drums in the streets and watched the heathen Maypole, a goodly pine tree, bare of branches, and some fifty foot in length, covered all over with flowers and herbs, being borne to the market square by two yoke of oxen. Each one had a sweet nosegay of flowers tied on the tip of his horns. On the village green by the Maypole, Jane put off her shoes and bared her breasts to me; I fled back to the farm.
    For weeks to come, I lost myself in my labour. I became a gardener sorting seeds, a thresher in the barn trying the strength of his flail, a mower whetting his scythe, a husbandman scouring his plow. I hedged, fenced, sowed, reaped, and gleaned until, by the grace of God, I was tormented no more by the thought of Jane Fuller’s naked breasts, with their round, roseate buds.
    But Satan was hard at work upon the farm. I have mentioned the shepherd, Peter Patch, who with his dog, Hal, tended my uncle Roger’s flock of two hundred and thirty-three sheep. Patch drove the sheep twice each day between the hill pastures and the fields. He fed his flock, gathered the lambs, carried them in his bosom, and gently led those that were with young. He smeared Stockholm tar upon the leg wounds of his sheep; it never failed to heal them.
    He knew not his own age. I reckoned that he was about five-and-thirty years old. He suffered from sciatica that made him limp upon his left leg. His father was my grandfather’s shepherd; his mother, who had lived idly and wandered about the country, went into London and disappeared when Peter was a child.
    In the summer, using sprinkled water and smoke, Patch acquired honey for the household from a hive in the hollow oak on the Ridge. It was there at the end of July that I espied him buggering a ewe. His breeches were down about his ankles. He stood half-naked behind the ewe, between her hind legs, which he held by the hooves close to his hips. The ewe, with her rear end in the air, stood upon her front legs. Then Patch saw me and dropped her hind legs. The ewe ran away.
    Patch pulled up his breeches and said, “If you tell what you have seen me do this day, they will surely hang me, master, on Gallows Hill.”
    Tears trickled down his cheeks. He said, “Do not let them hang me, master. Report me not to the constable. But if you must, and they do hang me, I beg a favor of you, master. Soon as I hang there, give my legs a tug and break my neck. Will you do that for me? Do not let me slowly strangle. Hasten my death! Promise me as a godly Christian!”
    Said I, “I cannot promise you.”
    God forgive me, but I could not bring myself to denounce Peter Patch. It pleased the Lord to forgive my transgression, for it was some months thereafter that Christ brought me into His chambers, wherein I rejoiced in His love.
    This happened on my twentieth birthday, at about seven of the clock on Friday evening of the tenth of March in the year of Christ 1615, whilst I read to my uncle Roger from Scripture. I had reached the introduction to chapter V of the Second Book of Esdras from the Apocrypha, viz., “In the latter time, truth shall be hid. Unrighteousness and all wickedness shall reign in the world.”
    My uncle interrupted me, saying, “Read to me instead of the love of Christ for His Elect and ours for Him in the verses of that most excellent Song which was Solomon’s.” He belched.
    I read aloud, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and was filled with a sense of Christ’s love and presence. The God of Israel was with me; I was wholly His. He was my soul’s husband, my unspeakable love, my exceeding great reward.
    I saw no shape but heard a voice only, saying, “Thou art cleansed from the blood and filth of thy sins.”
    I laughed and wept. The following day, my uncle set Esau to harrow the New Field and bade me have a rake’s head repaired at a