up" in a barn,
on the haymow, and the enormity of this practice made him shudder. He
had once seen a pack of greasy "playing-cards," and it seemed to him
to contain the quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy all
Divine law and outrage all human society, he felt that he could do it
by shuffling them. And he was quite right. The two bad boys enjoyed in
stealth their scandalous pastime, because they knew it was the most
wicked thing they could do. If it had been as sinless as playing
marbles, they would n't have cared for it. John sometimes drove past a
brown, tumble-down farmhouse, whose shiftless inhabitants, it was
said, were card-playing people; and it is impossible to describe how
wicked that house appeared to John. He almost expected to see its
shingles stand on end. In the old New England one could not in any
other way so express his contempt of all holy and orderly life as by
playing cards for amusement.

There was no element of Christmas in John's life, any more than there
was of Easter; and probably nobody about him could have explained
Easter; and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas
gifts. Indeed, he never had any presents of any kind, either on his
birthday or any other day. He expected nothing that he did not earn,
or make in the way of "trade" with another boy. He was taught to
work for what he received. He even earned, as I said, the extra
holidays of the day after the Fourth and the day after Thanksgiving.
Of the free grace and gifts of Christmas he had no conception. The
single and melancholy association he had with it was the quaking hymn
which his grandfather used to sing in a cracked and quavering voice:

"While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground."

The "glory" that "shone around" at the end of it--the doleful voice
always repeating, "and glory shone around "--made John as miserable
as "Hark! from the tombs." It was all one dreary expectation of
something uncomfortable. It was, in short, "religion." You'd got to
have it some time; that John believed. But it lay in his unthinking
mind to put off the "Hark! from the tombs" enjoyment as long as
possible. He experienced a kind of delightful wickedness in
indulging his dislike of hymns and of Sunday.

John was not a model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his
wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor much to
lie; and he despised "meanness" and stinginess, and