ave it. Boys and girls whom he
knew were "under conviction," and John began to feel not only panicky,
but lonesome. Cynthia Rudd had been anxious for days and days, and
not able to sleep at night, but now she had given herself up and found
peace. There was a kind of radiance in her face that struck John
with awe, and he felt that now there was a great gulf between him and
Cynthia. Everybody was going away from him, and his heart was getting
harder than ever. He could n't feel wicked, all he could do. And there
was Ed Bates his intimate friend, though older than he, a "whaling,"
noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction and sure he was going to be
lost. How John envied him! And pretty soon Ed "experienced religion."
John anxiously watched the change in Ed's face when he became one of the
elect. And a change there was. And John wondered about another thing.
Ed Bates used to go trout-fishing, with a tremendously long pole, in a
meadow brook near the river; and when the trout didn't bite right off,
Ed would--get mad, and as soon as one took hold he would give an awful
jerk, sending the fish more than three hundred feet into the air and
landing it in the bushes the other side of the meadow, crying out, "Gul
darn ye, I'll learn ye." And John wondered if Ed would take the little
trout out any more gently now.

John felt more and more lonesome as one after another of his playmates
came out and made a profession. Cynthia (she too was older than John)
sat on Sunday in the singers' seat; her voice, which was going to be a
contralto, had a wonderful pathos in it for him, and he heard it with a
heartache. "There she is," thought John, "singing away like an angel in
heaven, and I am left out." During all his after life a contralto voice
was to John one of his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures. It
suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable.

If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself into a conviction of sin,
John tried. And what made him miserable was, that he couldn't feel
miserable when everybody else was miserable. He even began to pretend
to be so. He put on a serious and anxious look like the others. He
pretended he did n't care for play; he refrained from chasing chipmunks
and snaring suckers; the songs of birds and the bright vivacity of the
summer--time that used to make him turn hand-springs smote him as a
discordant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, and he was getting to
be alarmed that