But not so with “Dodd.”

Here was where the harm came in, you wicked man.  You evolved the lying element of this boy’s nature.  Heaven knows that he had enough of this naturally, as I have plainly stated in the early chapters of this story; but you forced a hot-bed growth out of the seeds of falsehood that were lying dormant in “Dodd’s” young mind.

Amy Kelly had covered these up, under the foundation walls of truth, so deep that if you had built on what she started the germs would have died where they lay.  But no, you threw down the square blocks that Amy had laid with so much care; you spread the dung of deception over the dying seeds, and by the help of the unnatural heat which this foulness generated, brooding down from above, you sprouted the germs of untruth in the boy’s soul, and set a-growing plants whose roots run down into hell!

You taught “Dodd” Weaver to believe that a lie was better than the truth; that it would serve him better; bring him more glory; make him stand better in the eyes of his fellows, and that no one could find him out in all this trickery and deception.

“Dodd” learned in your school; O, yes; he learned that which it took him many years to forget, and you are to blame for it.  Some day I hope you may be compelled to face that lying old record of yours and that lightning flashes of guilt may be made to blaze into your treacherous eyes from out those pages that looked so clean when you showed them off, while the thunder of outraged truth rolls about your head till your teeth chatter in your mouth and your bones shake in your deceitful skin.

You see things must be made even somehow, and somewhere, and such a sinner as you have been deserves all this and more too.

Then, there was Mr. Sharp, who kept green and growing the shoots that Mr. Sliman had sprouted.  “Attendance” was Mr. Sharp’s hobby.  He kept a blackboard in the front hall of his school house, where it would be the first thing any one would see when he came into the building, and on this he scored the record of attendance every day.

There was no harm in that, I am sure; but then, this teacher used to keep the clock a little slower than town time, and besides, be had a way of ringing bells and bells at morning and at noon, and of not counting as tardy any one who got into the building any time before the ringing of the last bell, which really did not go off until some minutes after it should have done; and then there was the back way of written excuses, by which a fellow could sneak up in the rear and rub out a mark that really stood against him, and not have it count on the board down in the hall; and absences of a certain character were not counted either.  So, take it all in all, “Dodd” saw clearly that the shown record and the real record were not the same things by a long way, but that it was the former on which Mr. Sharp relied for his power and glory with the patrons of the school, and before the board of education.  So it was that Mr. Sharp watered what Mr. Sliman planted, and “Dodd” had to stand it all.