hints and sly remarks they fixed unalterably in the minds of their
fathers and mothers the conception that Harold was a desperately bad and
reckless boy. In his strength, skill, and courage they really believed,
and being afraid of him, they told stories of his exploits, even among
themselves, which bordered on the marvelous.

In reality he was not a leader of these raids. His temperament was not
of that kind. He did not care to assume direction of an expedition
because it carried too much trouble and some responsibility. His mind
was wayward and liable to shift to some other thing at any moment;
besides, mischief for its own sake did not appeal to him. The real
leaders were the two sons of the village shoemaker. They were
under-sized, weazened, shrewd, sly little scamps, and appeared not to
have the resolution of chickadees, but had a singular genius for getting
others into trouble. They knew how to handle spirits like Harold. They
dared him to do evil deeds, taunted him (as openly as they felt it safe
to do) with cowardice, and so spurred him to attempt some trifling
depredation merely as a piece of adventure. Almost invariably when they
touched him on this nerve Harold responded with a rush, and when
discovery came was nearly always among the culprits taken and branded,
for his pride would not permit him to sneak and run. So it fell out that
time after time he was found among the grape stealers or the melon
raiders, and escaped prosecution only because the men of the town laid
it to "boyish deviltry" and not to any deliberate intent to commit a
crime.

After his daughter married Mr. Excell made another effort to win the
love of his son and failed. Harold cared nothing for his father's
scholarship or oratorical powers, and never went to church after he was
sixteen, but he sometimes boasted of his father among the boys.

"If father wasn't a minister, he'd be one of the strongest men in this
town," he said once to Jack. "Look at his shoulders. His arms are hard,
too. Of course he can't show his muscle, but I tell you he can box and
swing dumb-bells."

If the father had known it, in the direction of athletics lay the road
to the son's heart, but the members of the First Church were not
sufficiently advanced to approve of a muscular minister, and so Mr.
Excell kept silent on such subjects, and swung his dumb-bells in
private. As a matter of fact, he had been a good hunter in his youth in
Michigan, and might have won h