dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy. As it was, his
voice began to change, a little golden down appeared on his cheeks and
upon the nape of his neck, while his first summer vacation was
altogether spoiled by a long spell of mumps.

His appetite was enormous. He ate heavy meat three times a day, but took
little or no exercise. The pimples on his face became worse and worse.
He grew peevish and nervous. He hated girls, and when in their society
was a very bull-calf for bashfulness and awkward self-consciousness. At
times the strangest and most morbid fancies took possession of him,
chief of which was that every one was looking at him while he was
walking in the street.

Vandover was a good little boy. Every night he said his prayers, going
down upon his huge knees at the side of his bed. To the Lord's Prayer he
added various petitions of his own. He prayed that he might be a good
boy and live a long time and go to Heaven when he died and see his
mother; that the next Saturday might be sunny all day long, and that the
end of the world might not come while he was alive.

It was during Vandover's first year at the High School that his eyes
were opened and that he acquired the knowledge of good and evil. Till
very late he kept his innocence, the crude raw innocence of the boy,
like that of a young animal, at once charming and absurd. But by and by
he became very curious, stirred with a blind unreasoned instinct. In the
Bible which he read Sunday afternoons, because his father gave him a
quarter for doing so, he came across a great many things that filled him
with vague and strange ideas; and one Sunday at church, when the
minister was intoning the Litany, he remarked for the first time the
words, "all women in the perils of child-birth."