roperty--that idea never
entered my head, and there was no one in that simple hamlet who would
have dreamed of putting it there. For one thing, no one was equipped
with it.

It is quite true I took all the tragedies to myself; and tallied them
off, in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a
sigh, "Another one gone--and on my account; this ought to bring me to
repentance; His patience will not always endure." And yet privately I
believed it would. That is, I believed it in the daytime; but not in the
night. With the going down of the sun my faith failed, and the clammy
fears gathered about my heart. It was then that I repented. Those were
awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with the bitterness of
death. After each tragedy I recognized the warning and repented;
repented and begged; begged like a coward, begged like a dog; and not in
the interest of those poor people who had been extinguished for my sake,
but only in my own interest. It seems selfish, when I look back on it
now.

My repentances were very real, very earnest; and after each tragedy they
happened every night for a long time. But as a rule they could not stand
the daylight. They faded out and shredded away and disappeared in the
glad splendor of the sun. They were the creatures of fear and darkness,
and they could not live out of their own place. The day gave me cheer
and peace, and at night I repented again. In all my boyhood life I am
not sure that I ever tried to lead a better life in the daytime--or
wanted to. In my age I should never think of wishing to do such a thing.
But in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I
realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the
race--never quite sane in the night. When "Injun Joe" died.[12] ... But
never mind: in another chapter I have already described what a raging
hell of repentance I passed through then. I believe that for months I
was as pure as the driven snow. After dark.

It was back in those far-distant days--1848 or '9--that Jim Wolf came to
us. He was from Shelbyville, a hamlet thirty or forty miles back in the
country, and he brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and
simplicities with him. He was approaching seventeen, a grave and slender
lad, trustful, honest, a creature to love and cling to. And he was
incredibly bashful.

It is to this kind that untoward things happen. My sister gave a
"candy-pull" on a winter's ni