scenes as he sat in the pit, and the play
began with some wonderful creature in tight bodice and painted cheeks,
sailing across the stage, it seemed to him that the flames of Divine
wrath might presently be bursting out over the house, or a great
judgment of God break down the roof and destroy them all.

But it did not; and he took courage. It is so easy to find courage in
those battles where we take no bodily harm! If conscience, sharpened by
the severe discipline he had known, pricked him awkwardly at the first,
he bore the stings with a good deal of sturdiness. A sinner, no
doubt,--that he knew long ago: a little slip, or indeed no slip at all,
had ranked him with the unregenerate. Once a sinner, (thus he pleasantly
reasoned,) and a fellow may as well be ten times a sinner: a bad job
anyhow. If in his moments of reflection--these being not yet wholly
crowded out from his life--there comes a shadowy hope of better things,
of some moral poise that should be in keeping with the tenderer
recollections of his boyhood,--all this can never come, (he bethinks
himself, in view of his old teaching,) except on the heel of some
terrible conviction of sin; and the conviction will hardly come without
some deeper and more damning weight of it than he feels as yet. A heavy
cumulation of the weight may some day serve him a good turn. Thus the
Devil twists his vague yearning for a condition of spiritual repose into
a pleasantly smacking lash with which to scourge his grosser appetites;
so that, upon the whole, Reuben drives a fine, showy team along the
high-road of indulgence.

Yet the minister's son had no love for gross vices; there were human
instincts in him (if it maybe said) that rebelled against his more
deliberate sinnings. Nay, he affected with his boon companions an
enjoyment of wanton excesses that he only half felt. A certain
adventurous, dare-devil reach in him craved exercise. The character of
Reuben at this stage would surely have offered a good subject for the
study and the handling of Dr. Mowry, if that worthy gentleman could have
won his way to the lad's confidence; but the ponderous methods of the
city parson showed no fineness of touch. Even the father, as we have
seen, could not reach down to any religious convictions of the son; and
Reuben keeps him at bay with a banter, and an exaggerated attention to
the personal comforts of the old gentleman, that utterly baffle him.
Reuben holds too much in dread the old cat