ntying the knot when it got dry.

There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when they
went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly
forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the
course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the
home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and
been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank
and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and
it covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as
children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he
fully expiated; and I will whisper to the young people here at the end
of the chapter that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and
insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning,
but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our
thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so
and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to
happen to me when I had done wrong.

SKATING

I am afraid that the young people will think I am telling them too much
about swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind of
amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost
as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the
river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very
first things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there. He
learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew just
the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fond
of skating, and kept at it all day long when there was ice for it,
which was not often in those soft winters. They made a very little ice
go a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it for skating as soon
as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them ever got drowned
there; though a boy would often start from one bank and go flying to the
other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin sheet sank and
swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the ice was not
thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have been on ice
which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all one bitter
afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first his feet
were very cold, and then they graduall