voice choked a little, and his head went suddenly down on his
arm.

"Well, now, I wouldn't mind, deary," spoke the old lady in soothing
tones, after a few moments of silence. "If you didn't know anything
about it, of course you wasn't to blame. 'Tisn't as if you had learned
it in Sunday-school, and all that, and I wouldn't mind about the
business. Like enough you'll have more days just as brisk as Sunday."

"It isn't that," Tode answered, disconsolately, lifting his head. "It's
all them Sundays that I've been and wasted, when I might have gone to
meeting. Been righter to go than to stay away, it seems; and it's
thinking about lots of other things that's wrong maybe, just like this,
and a fellow not knowing it."

And as he spoke he listlessly turned over the leaves of the old Bible,
until his eye was arrested by the words, "Thou shalt guide me with thy
counsel."

"That's exactly it," he told himself. "I've got to have a Bible. I'll
get one little enough to go into my jacket pocket, and then, says I,
we'll see if I can't find out about things. And after this I'm to shut
up box and go to church, am I? Well, that's one good thing, anyhow."

Presently he and Jim climbed up to the little room over the kitchen. No
sooner were they alone than Tode commenced on a subject that had puzzled
him.

"I say, Jim, how comes it that you knew all about those things and never
told _me_? That's treating a fellow pretty mean, I think. I always
shared the peanuts and things I got with you."

"See here," answered Jim, in open-eyed wonder; "what are you driving
at?"

"Why, _things_ that you know and never told me. Here your mother has got
a Bible, and you know verses in it, and know about heaven, and all, and
you never told me a word."

Jim sat down on the foot of the bed and laughed, long and loud and
merrily.

"I don't know, Tode, whether you're cracked, or what is the matter with
you," he said at last, when he could speak, "but I never heard a fellow
mixing up peanuts and heaven before."

Tode was someway not in a mood to be laughed at, so he gave vent
somewhat loftily to a solemn truth.

"Oh well, if you're a mind to think that the peanuts is of the most
consequence after all, why I don't know as I object."

And then the boy deliberately knelt down and began his evening prayer.
He was too ignorant to know that there were boys who thought it unmanly
to pray. It never occurred to him to omit his kneeling. As for Jim he
felt