d" drifted apart, as people are all the time
doing in this wide, wide world.

The parson had now been so long in the service that he was promoted to
a city pastorate, at this turn of the ecclesiastical wheel of fortune,
and so it fell out that "Dodd" went to the city to live. A more
unfortunate thing could hardly have happened to him.

Yet his lot was such as is common to most boys who go from country to
city life. They drift into the town where everything is new, strange
and rare to them, just at that age when they are the most curious, the
most on fire with new-born and wholly untamed passions, and the least
able to resist temptation. The glitter and tinsel of city life have
thus a charm for them which falls powerless upon young men who have
been familiar with such sights from their youth up, and the ignis
fatuus of gilded pleasures lures them into the quagmires of sin before
they are aware, where hosts of them sink down to death in the
quicksands of a fast life. "Dodd" was not an uncommon boy. When he
went to the city, he did as hosts have done before him, and as hosts
will continue to do. I suppose God knows why!

Yet the young man did not go all at once into by and forbidden paths.
Few folks do. Neither do they come out of such ways by one great leap.
There are those who preach a different doctrine.

Either "Dodd" or his father made a fatal mistake, too, on going to
town. Neither of them arranged to have the boy get to work, as soon as
he entered his new life. The elder thought his son was getting large
enough to look out for himself, and "Dodd" waited awhile to look
around. So, between the two, the cup of salvation that the boy should
have quaffed, fell, and was broken.

"Dodd" drifted about the town for many days, seeing what he could see.
His memory of Mr. Bright was still fresh and nourishing, and it often
held him from wrong, where his natural inclination would have carried
him clear over the line that separates evil from good. An iron, well
heated, will hold its heat long after it is taken out of the fire. It
grows cold, though, after a while.

So the boy began to circle about in the outer edge of the whirlpool
that sucks in its victims so relentlessly and remorselessly, always, in
the city.

I wish I did not have to tell the tale of still another descent into
Avernus, of this boy of the checkered career. But I have started out
to paint the picture exactly as it is, and I dip my brush in