cular household, but it applied practically to all the households
with which I was in any way familiar. It was a community where an
old-fashioned brand of applied theology was most strictly applied.
Heaven was a place which went unanimously Democratic every fall, because
all the Republicans had gone elsewhere. Hell was a place full of red-hot
coals and clinkered sinners and unbaptized babies and a smell like
somebody cooking ham, with a deputy devil coming in of a morning with an
asbestos napkin draped over his arm and flicking a fireproof cockroach
off the table cloth and leaning across the back of Satan's chair and
saying: "Good mornin', boss. How're you going to have your lost souls
this mornin'--fried on one side or turned over?" Sunday was three weeks
long, and longer than that if it rained. About all a fellow could do
after he'd come back from Sunday school was to sit round with his feet
cramped into the shoes and stockings which he never wore on week days
and with the rest of him incased in starchy, uncomfortable dress-up
clothes--just sit round and sit round and itch. You couldn't scratch
hard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and with good, broad, free
strokes, which is the only satisfactory way to scratch. In our town they
didn't spend Sunday; they kept the Sabbath, which is a very different
thing.

Looking back on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generally
speaking, when spanked I deserved it. But always there were two
punishable things against which--being disciplined--my youthful spirit
revolted with a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice. One was for
violation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong--the code, I
mean, not the violation--without knowing exactly why it was wrong; and
the other, repeated times without number, was when I had been caught
reading nickul libruries, erroneously referred to by our elders as dime
novels.

I read them at every chance; so did every normal boy of my acquaintance.
We traded lesser treasures for them; we swapped them on the basis of
two old volumes for one new one; we maintained a clandestine
circulating-library system which had its branch offices in every stable
loft in our part of town. The more daring among us read them in school
behind the shelter of an open geography propped up on the desk.

Shall you ever forget the horror of the moment when, carried away on the
wings of adventure with Nick Carter or Big-Foot Wallace or Frank Reade
or bully