e
another direction.

By these saucy sketches, Terry Lute was at one period involved in
gravest trouble; the schoolmaster, good doctor of the wayward,
thrashed him for a rogue; and from a prophetic pulpit the parson,
anxious shepherd, came as near to promising him a part in perdition as
honest conviction could bring him to speak. Terry Lute was startled.
In the weakness of contrition he was moved to promise that he would
draw their faces no more, and thereafter he confined his shafts of
humor to their backs; but as most men are vulnerable to ridicule from
behind, and as the schoolmaster had bandy legs and the parson meek
feet and pious shoulders, Terry Lute's pencil was more diligently, and
far more successfully, employed than ever. The illicit exercise, the
slyer art, and the larger triumph, filled him with chuckles and winks.

"Ecod!" he laughed to his own soul; "you is a sure-enough, clever
little marvel, Terry Lute, me b'y!"

What gave Terry Lute's art a profound turn was the sheer indolence of
his temperamental breed. He had no liking at all for labor; spreading
fish on the flakes, keeping the head of his father's punt up to the
sea on the grounds, splitting a turn of birch and drawing a bucket of
water from the well by the Needle, discouraged the joy of life. He
scolded, he begged, he protested that he was ailing, and so behaved in
the cleverest fashion; but nothing availed him until after hours of
toil he achieved a woeful picture of a little lad at work on the flake
at the close of day. It was Terry Lute himself, no doubt of it at all,
but a sad, worn child, with a lame back, eyes of woe, gigantic
tears--a tender young spirit oppressed, and, that there might be no
mistake about the delicacy of his general health, an angel waiting
overhead.

"Thomas," wept Terry Lute's mother, "the wee lad's doomed."

"Hut!" Skipper Tom blurted.

"Shame t' you!" cried Terry's mother, bursting into a new flood of
tears.

After that, for a season, Terry Lute ran foot-loose and joyous over
the mossy hills of Out-of-the-Way.

"Clever b'y, Terry Lute!" thinks he, without a qualm.

It chanced by and by that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at
the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist
of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the
seat of the scorner. It was observed presently--no eyes so keen for
such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way--that Bill Bull was coming