I have told you all I know. And Joseph waited eagerly for his father to
come home, and plagued him to tell him a story.

But after a long day spent in the counting-house his father was often
too tired to take him on his knee and instruct him, for Joseph's
curiosity was unceasing and very often wearisome. Now, Joseph, his
father said, you will learn more about these things when you are older.
And why not now? he asked, and his grandmother answered that it was
change of air that he wanted and not books; and they began to speak of
the fierce summer that had taken the health out of all of them, and of
how necessary it was for a child of that age to be sent up to the hills.

Dan looked into his son's face, and Rachel seemed to be right. A thin,
wan little face, that the air of the hills will brighten, he said; and
he began at once to make arrangements for Joseph's departure for a hill
village, saying that the pastoral life of the hills would take his mind
off Samuel, Hebrew and Babylon. Rachel was doubtful if the shepherds
would absorb Joseph's mind as completely as his father thought. She
hoped, however, that they would. As soon as he hears the sound of the
pipe, his father answered. A prophecy this was, for while Joseph was
resting after the fatigue of the journey, he was awakened suddenly by a
sound he had never heard before, and one that interested him strangely.
His nurse told him that the sound he was hearing was a shepherd's pipe.
The shepherd plays and the flock follows, she said. And when may I see
the flock coming home with the shepherd? he asked. To-morrow evening,
she answered, and the time seemed to him to loiter, so eager was he to
see the flocks returning and to watch the she-goat milked.

And in the spring as his strength came back he followed the shepherds
and heard from them many stories of wolves and dogs, and from a shepherd