Page:Moonfleet - John Meade Falkner.pdf/172

 than a burned child does the fire. I will learn them all to thee some day, but for the moment take this Latin which I got by heart: 'Abite a me in ignem eternum qui paratus est diabolo et angelis ejus.' Englished it means: 'Depart from me into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,' but hath at least double that power in Latin. So get that after me by heart, and use it freely if thou art led to think that there are evil presences near, and in such lonely places as this cave."

I humoured him by doing as he desired, and that the rather because I hoped his thoughts would thus be turned away from the writing; but as soon as I had the spell by rote he turned back to the parchment, saying, " He was but a poor divine who wrote this, for besides choosing ill-fitting verses, he cannot even give right numbers to them. For see here: 'The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away and we are gone,' and he writes Psalm . 21. Now I have said that psalm with parson verse and verse about for every sleeper we have laid to rest in churchyard mould for thirty years; and know it hath not twenty verses in it, all told, and this same verse is the clerk's verse and cometh tenth, and yet he calls it twenty-first. I wish I had here a Common Prayer, and I would prove my words."

He stopped and flung me back the parchment scornfully; but I folded it and slipped it in my pocket, brooding all the while over a strange thought that his last words had brought to me. Nor did I tell him that I