The deacon and his fellow-members sat upon the platform till recess, listening to recitations, and then left; the president remarking to the teacher as they went out, that they “thought the school was doing very well!”

“Dodd” and Mr. Bright walked home together after school was out.

“Where do you suppose I hid?” asked “Dodd,” as they walked along.

“I have no idea,” returned Mr. Bright.

“I ran down cellar, and, crawled part way up the airshaft back of the furnace,” said “Dodd.”  And that was the last that was ever said about the affair by either teacher or pupil.

CHAPTER XVII.

For a few months after the event just narrated “Dodd” went to school to Mr. Bright, and during the whole time he deported himself as a good and faithful student should.  But with the next meeting of the Conference, Parson Weaver was shifted again, and with him went the hero of this story. (I think “Dodd” may justly be called a hero after so bravely doing what he did in the presence of the school and the board of education, as just told.) Mr. Bright also left Emburg the following year, and so he and “Dodd” drifted apart, as people are all the time doing in this wide, wide world.

The parson had now been so long in the service that he was promoted to a city pastorate, at this turn of the ecclesiastical wheel of fortune, and so it fell out that “Dodd” went to the city to live.  A more unfortunate thing could hardly have happened to him.

Yet his lot was such as is common to most boys who go from country to city life.  They drift into the town where everything is new, strange and rare to them, just at that age when they are the most curious, the most on fire with new-born and wholly untamed passions, and the least able to resist temptation.  The glitter and tinsel of city life have thus a charm for them which falls powerless upon young men who have been familiar with such sights from their youth up, and the ignis fatuus of gilded pleasures lures them into the quagmires of sin before they are aware, where hosts of them sink down to death in the quicksands of a fast life.  “Dodd” was not an uncommon boy.  When he went to the city, he did as hosts have done before him, and as hosts will continue to do.  I suppose God knows why!

Yet the young man did not go all at once into by and forbidden paths.  Few folks do.  Neither do they come out of such ways by one great leap.  There are those who preach a different doctrine.

Either “Dodd” or his father made a fatal mistake, too, on going to town.  Neither of them arranged to have the boy get to work, as soon as he entered his new life.  The elder thought his son was getting large enough to look out for himself, and “Dodd” waited awhile to look around.  So, between the two, the cup of salvation that the boy should have quaffed, fell, and was broken.

“Dodd” drifted about the town for many days, seeing what he could see.  His memory of Mr. Bright was still fresh and nourishing, and it often held him from wrong, where his natural inclination would have carried him clear over the line that separates evil from good.  An iron, well heated, will hold its heat long after it is taken out of the fire.  It grows cold, though, after a while.