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The Nest of Spears

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The Nest of Spears

By: Frank W. Boreham
Narrated by: Joseph Phil, Mary Hall, Jenny Moore, Clifford Tim
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A Maori myth, as Boreham tells it, holds that for a hundred moons there was no war between the people of the Bay of Islands and the neighbouring tribes of Tippahee. Time and again the armed warriors took up their positions and waited for the fighting to start. And time and again, in the night before the battle, the chiefs' spears vanished, and the baffled tribesmen went home.It was Whakatuni who solved it, the war-lord's daughter, who liked to wander alone in the hills and listen to the bell-birds in the wooded valleys. High on a ledge of rock jutting from the mountainside she found the nest of the great white peace-bird. It was built entirely of the missing spears.In this book, Boreham writes, he has touched on a thousand questions over which it would be easy to pick a fight. He has tried instead to take the glittering spearpoints out of the realm of strife and carry them somewhere the peace-bird could fold her wings and gentle souls like Whakatuni feel at home.A Nest of Spears, published in 1927, collects twenty-eight essays from Boreham's Melbourne years. It took him ten years to understand Mary McNab, who lived on the slopes of Saddle Hill, wore a hunted look, and whom he was often tempted to give up as a bad job. He wonders why a whip is such a popular toy, after finding a cheerful small boy at a birthday party who had not let go of his all day. He finally writes about the donkey, a subject he had put off for years from fear that once started he would never stop. He shows his photograph album to a friend who asks, instead, to see the failures, on the grounds that he would learn more from those. He watches a girl in grey carry a wreath of red roses up the opposite side of the street and calls the whole household to the window. And a railway journey puts him in a compartment with the old employer of a servant called Chrissy, whose story he had written down the day before.Twenty-eight complete essays in three parts, with Boreham's own introduction, each short enough to read in a single sitting. Good for daily reading, for quiet time, and for any preacher hunting fresh illustrations.Boreham wrote more than fifty books and has been called one of the finest Christian essayists in the language. This is late work, from a man who had decided that a spear is better used for building a nest.©2026 Frank W. Boreham (P)2026 Robert S. Zayas
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