"

At the end of half an hour Skippy looked up nonplussed.

"What do you know about the Bible, anyhow?"

"I know a lot," said Snorky astutely.

"Where do you get the ten commandments, anyhow?"

Snorky repeated the question, more and more perplexed.

"Why it's in Genesis isn't it?"

"Naw, I looked all through that."

"How about Solomon? He was wise to everything."

"Who was the guy who went up to Heaven? Perhaps he got 'em."

"Let's ask the cook."

Which was done.

"Now what in the Sam Hill has Skippy to do with the ten commandments or
the ten commandments with Skippy?" said Snorky, observing the
extraordinary concentration on his chum's face as he considered them
carefully one by one. "Perhaps the heat has hit him and he's going in
for religion."

The explanation of Skippy's eccentric taste was a perfectly simple one.
No sooner had he departed from the lovely presence of Miss Jennie Tupper
with only the vaguest idea of what he had pledged himself not to do, but
with the liveliest and most disturbing memory of the softest of hands,
than he had bitterly repented the prodigal manner in which he had thrown
away his opportunities.

"Why the deuce didn't I save something out," he said to himself angrily,
with a sudden recollection of moonlight nights to come. "My aunt's cat's
pants, but I certainly went to sleep."

From the parsonage to the Greens', from the soup to the watermelon, but
one idea obsessed him: how was he to find something else to swear off?
For instinct, which supplants reason in such sentimental voyages, warned
him that to such a professional reformer as Miss Jennie Tupper his sole
fascination lay in a lively display of original sin.

The more he thought it over the more depressed he had become. The truth
was that he had outrageously neglected his opportunities and had little
to offer. All he could do was to fall back on his imagination and such
knowledge of the world as returned to him from an extensive preparation
in modern fiction. The trouble with his imagination was it worked too
spontaneously. How much better he could have done with a little more
preparation!

"Gee, I never knew a hand could give you such a fuzzy feeling," he said
with a heavy sigh.

It was then that he had thought of the Bible and the ten commandments
with much resulting perplexity to Snorky.

"Well, I'll be eternally dog-switched," he said all at once. "I never
would have believed it!"

"Believed what?" said