uthorities; the third degree and flagellation.

We conceive our man decided that his career had been perhaps too
eventful. Yet Penrod had condensed all of it into eight hours.

It appears that he had at least some shadowy perception of a recent
fulness of life, for, as he leaned against the fence, gazing upon his
wistful Duke, he sighed again and murmured aloud:

"WELL, HASN'T THIS BEEN A DAY!"

But in a little while a star came out, freshly lighted, from the highest
part of the sky, and Penrod, looking up, noticed it casually and
a little drowsily. He yawned. Then he sighed once more, but not
reminiscently: evening had come; the day was over. It was a sigh of pure
ennui.

CHAPTER VII EVILS OF DRINK

Next day, Penrod acquired a dime by a simple and antique process which
was without doubt sometimes practised by the boys of Babylon. When the
teacher of his class in Sunday-school requested the weekly contribution,
Penrod, fumbling honestly (at first) in the wrong pockets, managed to
look so embarrassed that the gentle lady told him not to mind, and said
she was often forgetful herself. She was so sweet about it that, looking
into the future, Penrod began to feel confident of a small but regular
income.

At the close of the afternoon services he did not go home, but proceeded
to squander the funds just withheld from China upon an orgy of the most
pungently forbidden description. In a Drug Emporium, near the church, he
purchased a five-cent sack of candy consisting for the most part of the
heavily flavoured hoofs of horned cattle, but undeniably substantial,
and so generously capable of resisting solution that the purchaser must
needs be avaricious beyond reason who did not realize his money's worth.

Equipped with this collation, Penrod contributed his remaining nickel to
a picture show, countenanced upon the seventh day by the legal but not
the moral authorities. Here, in cozy darkness, he placidly insulted his
liver with jaw-breaker upon jaw-breaker from the paper sack, and in a
surfeit of content watched the silent actors on the screen.

One film made a lasting impression upon him. It depicted with relentless
pathos the drunkard's progress; beginning with his conversion to beer
in the company of loose travelling men; pursuing him through an
inexplicable lapse into evening clothes and the society of some
remarkably painful ladies, next, exhibiting the effects of alcohol on
the victim's domestic disposition,