frozen with alarm, waiting to be denounced. But my Mother
remarked on the visit of the plumbers two or three days before,
and my Father instantly took up the suggestion. No doubt that was
it; the mischievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab the
pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion fell on me; no question
was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but
outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite.

We attribute, I believe, too many moral ideas to little children.
It is obvious that in this tremendous juncture I ought to have
been urged forward by good instincts, or held back by naughty
ones. But I am sure that the fear which I experienced for a short
time, and which so unexpectedly melted away, was a purely
physical one. It had nothing to do with the motions of a contrite
heart. As to the destruction of the fountain, I was sorry about
that, for my own sake, since I admired the skipping water
extremely and had had no idea that I was spoiling its display.
But the emotions which now thronged within me, and which led me,
with an almost unwise alacrity, to seek solitude in the back-
garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not
ashamed of having successfully--and so surprisingly--deceived my
parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a
providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I
had other things to think of.

In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or
infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little;
in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if
you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My
Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell