vindictive virtuousness
imbued him with such a desire to lead an upright life that he was rather
a bother to his friends with his scruples. A girl at school mislaid a
pencil which she thought she had lent him, and he began to have a morbid
belief that he must have stolen it; he became frantic with the mere
dread of guilt; he could not eat or sleep, and it was not till he went
to make good the loss with a pencil which his grandfather gave him that
the girl said she had found her pencil in her desk, and saved him from
the despair of a self-convicted criminal. After that his father tried to
teach him the need of using his reason as well as his conscience
concerning himself, and not to be a little simpleton. But he was always
in an anguish to restore things to their owners, like the good boys in
the story-books, and he suffered pangs of the keenest remorse for the
part he once took in the disposition of a piece of treasure-trove.
This was a brown-paper parcel which he found behind a leaning gravestone
in the stone-cutter's yard, and which he could not help peeping into. It
was full of raisins, and in the amaze of such a discovery he could not
help telling the other boys. They flocked round and swooped down upon
the parcel like birds of prey, and left not a raisin behind. In vain he
implored them not to stain their souls with this misdeed; neither the
law nor the prophets availed; neither the awful shadow of the prison
which he cast upon them, nor the fear of the last judgment which he
invoked. They said that the raisins did not belong to anybody; that the
owner had forgotten all about them; that they had just been put there by
some one who never intended to come back for them. He went away
sorrowing, without touching a raisin (he felt that the touch must have
stricken him with death), and far heavier in soul than the hardened
accomplices of his sin, of whom he believed himself the worst in having
betrayed the presence of the raisins to them.

He used to talk to himself when he was little, but one day his mother
said to him jokingly, "Don't you know that he who talks to himself has
the devil for a listener?" and after that he never dared whisper above
his breath when he was alone, though his father and mother had both
taught him that there was no devil but his own evil will. He shuddered
when he heard a dog howling in the night, for that was a sign that
somebody was going to die. If he heard a hen crow, as a hen sometimes
u