n his way to church--with
hospitality even for the like of him, thank God!--he walked slowly
with head bent until, remembering his great agility and strength,
he began to run, giving a varied exhibition of skips and jumps
terminating in a sort of gallop. Once in the sacred house he
looked to right and left accusingly, and aloft with encouraging
applause. His God was one of wrath, vengeance, and destruction;
his hell the destination of his enemies. They who resented the
screw of his avarice, and pulled their thumbs away; they who
treated him with contempt, and whose faults, compared to his own,
were as a mound to a mountain--they were all to burn with
everlasting fire, while he, on account of that happy thought the
day of the sheep-shearing, was to sit forever with the angels in
heaven.

"Ye're going t' heaven, I hear," said Darrel, who had repaired a
clock for him, and heard complaint of his small fee.

"I am," was the spirited reply.

"God speed ye!" said the tinker, as he went away.

In such disfavour was the poor man, that all would have been glad
to have him go anywhere, so he left Hillsborough.

One day in the Christmas holidays, a boy came to the door of Riley
Brooke, with a buck-saw on his arm.

"I'm looking for work," said the boy, "and I'd be glad of the
chance to saw your wood."

"How much a cord?" was the loud inquiry.

"Forty cents."

"Too much," said Brooke. "How much a day?"

"Six shillings."

"Too much," said the old man, snappishly. "I used to git six
dollars a month, when I was your age, an' rise at four o'clock in
the mornin' an' work till bedtime. You boys now-days are a lazy
good-fer-nothin' lot. What's yer name?"

"Sidney Trove."

"Don't want ye."

"Well, mister," said the boy, who was much in need of money, "I'll
saw your wood for anything you've a mind to give me."

"I'll give ye fifty cents a day," said the old man.

Trove hesitated. The sum was barely half what he could earn, but
he had given his promise, and fell to. Riley Brooke spent half the
day watching and urging him to faster work. More than once the boy
was near quitting, but kept his good nature and a strong pace.
When, at last, Brooke went away, Trove heard a sly movement of the
blinds, and knew that other eyes were on the watch. He spent three
days at the job--laming, wearisome days, after so long an absence
from heavy toil.

"Wal, I suppose y& want money," Brooke snapped, as the boy came to
the d