y.

Juliet smiled upon his ardour, and, leading him to a bench beneath a
flowering myrtle, made him sit down beside her, while she spoke pious
things about Adam and the catechism and the salvation of the world--to
all of which he listened with wide-opened eyes and a fluttering heart.
He wondered why no one had ever before told him such beautiful things
about God and the manifold importance of keeping a clean heart and
loving your neighbour as yourself. It seemed to him that he had been
living in sin for the twelve years of his life and he feared that he
should find it impossible to purge his mind of evil passions and to love
the coloured boy Boss who had stolen his best fishing line. He asked
Juliet if she thought he would be able to withstand the assaults of
Satan as the minister told him to do; but she laughed and said that
there was no Satan who went about like a roaring lion--only cruelty and
anger and ill-will, and that he must be kind to his brothers and
sisters, and to animals, and not rob birds' nests, which was very wrong.
Then she added as an afterthought, with a saintly look in her eyes, that
he must love God. He promised that he should try to do so, though he
wished in his heart that she had told him to love herself instead. As
he sat in the soft light, watching her beautiful face rising against a
background of lilies, his young brain thrilled with the joy of life. It
was such a glorious thing to live in a great, kind world, with a big,
beneficent God above the blue, and to love all mankind--not harbouring
an angry thought or an ill feeling! He looked into the kind eyes beside
him and felt that he should like to be a saint or a minister--not a
lawyer, which might be wicked after all. Then he remembered the
waxen-faced, choleric clergyman of the church his stepmother attended,
but he put the memory away. No, he would not be like that; he would not
preach fire and brimstone from a white-pine pulpit. He would be large
and just and merciful like God; and Juliet Burwell would come to hear
him preach, looking up at him with her blue, blue glance. In the
meantime he would not rob that marsh hen's nest which he had found. He
would never steal another egg. He wished that he didn't have that
drawerful at home. He would give them to Sairy Jane if she wanted
them--all except the snake's egg, which he might keep, because serpents
were an accursed race. Yes, Sairy Jane might have them all, and he
wouldn't pull her hair ag