Much of the
boy had gone out of him. He moved with the motion and sloth of decrepit
age. Next week you will not know him for the same boy. His feet will
be hardened, he will dance over the macadam mixed streets with the
callosity of a stone-crusher, and the fugacious cat will be lucky if
it gets its tail through the fence in time. The mourner's bench humility
of today will have changed to the noisy glee of the hardened criminal.
His baseball practice will pervade the middle of every street, and his
large and assorted stock of general trouble and annoyance will be
displayed under all our noses with the request that we will call and
examine before purchasing elsewhere. I cannot understand how any man
can be indifferent to the blessings of the church, when he remembers
that one of them is the Sunday School--invented by the Fathers as an
ingenious and effective place of torment for this Boy. Through the
week he is intolerable, but the blessed Sabbath is to him a day of
retribution. It is the awful day when his ears are washed and touseled
about; when his eyes are punched out by the towelled but unsparing
hand of a Christian mother; when his shoes are put back on him for a
day, and when, with a neck encircled by a collar starched to maddening
stiffness, and with a pocket handkerchief the consistency of pasteboard,
he is sent to the place of punishment.
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