s neck, inside his
clothes. He says little Joseph must 'a left his off, or he'd 'a' been
saved, too. He showed me a piece in one 'a these little religious books
that says there was nothing annoyed the devil like a scapular--that a man
can't be burned or done dirt to in no way if he wears one. I says it's a
pity the Prof. didn't have one on, but Kelly says they won't work for
Protestants. But I don't know--I never _purtended_ to be good on these
propositions of religious matters. And there wasn't any chance of findin'
the kid to prove if Kelly had it right or not.

"But the Prof. he was certainly a great boy for puttin' up three-sheets
about his own two kids; anybody that would listen--friend or
stranger--made no difference to _him_. He starred 'em to anybody, you
understan'--what corkers they was, and all like that. It seemed like
Kelly's havin' two kids also kind 'a touched on his feelin's. Honest, I
ain't ever got so worked up over anything before in me whole life."

When this person had gone the old man called the two boys to his room and
prayed with them; keeping the younger to sit with him a long time
afterward, as if feeling that his was the heavier heart.

CHAPTER XII

A NEW THEORY OF A CERTAIN WICKED MAN

The time of the first sorrow was difficult for the boy. There was that
first hard sleep after one we love has gone--in which we must always
dream that it is not true--a sleep from which we awaken to suffer all the
shock of it again. Then came black nights when the perfect love for the
perfect father came back in all its early tenderness to cry the little boy
to sleep. Yet it went rapidly enough at last, as times of sorrow go for
the young. There even came a day when he found in a secret place of his
heart a chastened, hopeful inquiry if all might not have been for the
best. He had loved his father--there had been between them an unbreakable
bond; yet this very love had made him suffer at every thought of him while
he was living, whereas now he could love him with all tender memories and
with no poisonous misgivings about future meetings with their
humiliations. Now his father was made perfect in Heaven, and even
Grandfather Delcher--whose aloofness here he had ceased to blame--would
not refuse to meet and know him there.

Naturally, then, he turned to his grandfather in his great need for a new
idol to fill the vacant niche. Aforetime the old man in his study upstairs
had been little more than a g