As I left the shop, I was conscious of a certain pleasure in the
success of my attempt, as any thief might be; and I walked off
very fast, clattering the coppers in the tin pail.

When I was fairly through the bars that led into the farmer's
field, and nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies,
and looked at them as they lay in my palm.

Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning, but it
seemed to me as if the sky grew suddenly dark; and those two
pennies began to burn through my hand, to scorch me, as if they
were red hot, to my very soul. It was agony to hold them. I laid
them down under a tuft of grass in the footpath, and ran as if I
had left a demon behind me. I did my errand, and returning, I
looked about in the grass for the two cents, wondering whether
they could make me feel so badly again. But my good angel hid
them from me; I never found them.

I was too much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I
had already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him
in the parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier
child if I bad confessed, for I had to carry about with me for
weeks and months a heavy burden of shame. I thought of myself as
a thief, and used to dream of being carried off to jail and
condemned to the gallows for my offense: one of my story-books
told about a boy who was hanged at Tyburn for stealing, and how
was I better than he?

Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of afterwards, I never again