held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic. Besides
this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his
widowed mother after school; and every Saturday afternoon he went,
sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady.
This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of
stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr.
Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took
cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be
honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors. Such was the
barren tale of Virtue's gain. But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this
book was one Budd Jackson, who led 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