Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.

CHAPTER V

THE LIFE OF CRIME IS APPRAISED AND CHOSEN

It came to seem expedient to Bernal, however, in the first spring of his new life, to make a final choice between early death and a life, of sin.  Matters came to press upon him, and since virtue was useful only to get one into Heaven, it was not worth the effort unless one meant to die at once.  This was an alternative not without its lures, despite the warnings preached all about him.  It would surely be interesting to die, if one had come properly to the Feet.  Even coming to but one of the Feet, as he had, might make it still more interesting.  Perhaps he would not, for this reason, be always shut up in Heaven.  In his secret heart was a lively desire to see just what they did to Milo Barrus, if he should continue to spell God with a little g on his very death-bed—­that is, if he could see it without disadvantage to himself:  But then, you could save that up, because you must die sometime, like Xerxes the Great; and meantime, there was the life of evil now opening wide to the vision with all enticing refreshments.

First, it meant no school.  He had ceased to picture relief in this matter by the school-house burning some morning, preferably a Monday morning, one second after school had taken in.  For a month he had daily dramatised to himself the building’s swift destruction amid the kind and merry flames.  But Allan, to whom he had one day hinted the possibility of this gracious occurrence, had reminded him brutally that they would probably have school in the Methodist church until a new school-house could be built.  For Allan loved his school and his teacher.

But a life of evil promised other joys besides this negative one of no school.  In his latest Sunday-school book, Ralph Overton, the good boy, not only attended school slavishly, so that at thirteen he “could write a good business hand”; but he practised those little tricks of picking up every pin, always untying the string instead of cutting it, keeping his shoes neatly polished and his hands clean, which were, in a simpler day, held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic.  Besides this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his widowed mother after school; and every Saturday afternoon he went, sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady.  This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr. Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors.  Such was the barren tale of Virtue’s gain.  But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this book was one Budd Jackson, who led