doing what he did in the presence of the school and the board of
education, as just told.) Mr. Bright also left Emburg the following
year, and so he and "Dodd" drifted apart, as people are all the time
doing in this wide, wide world.

The parson had now been so long in the service that he was promoted to
a city pastorate, at this turn of the ecclesiastical wheel of fortune,
and so it fell out that "Dodd" went to the city to live. A more
unfortunate thing could hardly have happened to him.

Yet his lot was such as is common to most boys who go from country to
city life. They drift into the town where everything is new, strange
and rare to them, just at that age when they are the most curious, the
most on fire with new-born and wholly untamed passions, and the least
able to resist temptation. The glitter and tinsel of city life have
thus a charm for them which falls powerless upon young men who have
been familiar with such sights from their youth up, and the ignis
fatuus of gilded pleasures lures them into the quagmires of sin before
they are aware, where hosts of them sink down to death in the
quicksands of a fast life. "Dodd" was not an uncommon boy. When he
went to the city, he did as hosts have done before him, and as hosts
will continue to do. I suppose God knows why!

Yet the young man did not go all at once into by and forbidden paths.
Few folks do. Neither do they come out of such ways by one great leap.
There are those who preach a different doctrine.

Either "Dodd" or his father made a fatal mistake, too, on going to
town. Neither of them arranged to have the boy get to work, as soon as
he entered his new life. The elder thought his son was getting large