way, he finally led me to the top of Bald Hill, where there is not a scrap of soil, and not the slightest indication, and still persisted that he found it there, you will understand, Sister Medliker, the incorrigibility of his conduct, and how he has added the sin of ‘false witness’ to his breaking the Eighth Commandment.  But I leave him to your Christian discipline!  Let us hope that if, through his stiff-necked obduracy, he has haply escaped the vengeance of man’s law, he will not escape the rod of the domestic tabernacle.”

“Ye kin leave him to me,” said Mrs. Medliker, in her anxiety to get rid of the parson, assuming a confidence she was far from feeling.

“So be it, Sister Medliker,” said Staples, drawing a long, satisfactory breath; “and let us trust that when you have rastled with his flesh and spirit, you will bring us joyful tidings to Wednesday’s Mother’s Meeting.”

He clapped his soft hat on his head, cast another glance at the wicked Johnny, opened the door with his hand behind him, and backed himself into the road.

“Now, Johnny,” said Mrs. Medliker, setting her lips together as the door closed, “look me right in the face, and say where you stole that gold.”

But Johnny evidently did not think that his mother’s face at that moment offered any moral support, for he did not look at her; but, after gazing at the kettle, said slowly, “I didn’t steal no gold.”

“Then,” said Mrs. Medliker triumphantly, “if ye didn’t steal it, you’d say right off how ye got it.”

Children are often better logicians than their elders.  To John Bunyan the stealing of gold and the mere refusal to say where he got it were two distinct and separate things; that the negation of the second proposition meant the affirmation of the first he could not accept.  But then children are also imitative, and fearful of the older intellect.  It struck Johnny that his mother might be right, and that to her it really meant the same thing.  So, after a moment’s silence he replied more confidently, “I suppose I stoled it.”

But he was utterly unprepared for the darkening change in his mother’s face, and her furious accents.  “You stole it?—­you stole it, you limb!  And you sit there and brazenly tell me!  Who did you steal it from?  Tell me quick, afore I wring it out of you!”

Completely astounded and bewildered at this new turn of affairs, Johnny again fell back upon the dreadful truth, and gasped, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, you devil!  Did you take it from Frazer’s?”

“No.”

“From the Simmons Brothers?”

“No.”

“From the Blazing Star Company?”

“No.”

“From a store?”

“No.”

“Then, in created goodness!—­Where did you get it?”

Johnny raised his brown-gooseberry eyes for a single instant to his mother’s and said, “I found it.”

Mrs. Medliker gasped again and stared hopelessly at the ceiling.  Yet she was conscious of a certain relief.  After all, it was possible that he had found it—­liar as he undoubtedly was.