a life of voluptuous sloth, except at times when the evil one moved him to activity.  At these bad moments he might go bobbing for catfish on a Sabbath, or purloin fruit from the orchard of Farmer Haskins (who would gladly have given some to him if he had but asked for it civilly, so the book said); or he might bully smaller boys whom he met on their way to school, taking their sailor hats away from them, or jeering coarsely at their neatly brushed garments.  When Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly to his vicious nature.  He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor and played a game called pin-pool with a “flashy stranger” at the tavern; hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.

This touch about the circus, well-intended, to be sure, was yet fatal to all good the tale might have done the little boy.  Clytie, who read most of the story to him, declared Budd Jackson to be “a regular mean one.”  But in his heart Bernal, thinking all at once of the circus, sickened unutterably of Virtue.  To drive eight spirited white horses, seated high on one of those gay closed wagons—­those that went through the street with that delicious hollow rumble—­hearing perchance the velvet tread, or the clawing and snarling of some pent ferocity—­a leopard, a lion, what not; to hear each day that muffled, flattened beating of a bass drum and cymbals far within the big tent, quick and still more quickly, denoting to the experienced ear that pink and spangled Beauty danced on the big white horse at a deathless gallop; to know that one might freely enter that tented elysium—­if it were possible he would run off with a circus though it meant that he had the morals of a serpent!

Now, eastward from the big house lay the village and its churches:  thither was tame virtue.  But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance.  Still more remotely far, at the hill’s rim, was a blur of woods beyond which the sun went down each night.  This, in the little boy’s mind, was the highway to the glad free Life of Evil.  Many days he looked to that western wood when the sky was a gush of colour behind its furred edge, perceiving all manner of allurements to beckon him, hearing them plead, feeling them tug.  Daily his spirit quickened within him to their solicitations, leaping out and beyond him in some magic way to bring back veritable meanings and values of the future.

Then a day came when the desire to be off was no longer resistible.  There was a month of school yet; an especially bitter thought, for had he not lately been out of school a week with mumps; and during that very week had not the teacher’s father died, so that he was cheated out of the resulting three-days’ vacation, other children being free while he lay on a bed of pain—­if you tasted pickles or any sour thing?  Not only was it useless to try to learn to write “a good business hand,” like Ralph Overton—­he took the phrase to mean one of those pictured hands that were always pointing to things in the newspaper advertisements—­but there was the circus and other evil things—­and he was getting on in years.