instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even he had picked it up.
At home, as usual, there was not enough to eat, and home he should have
taken it as he did his wages every Saturday night. Right conduct in this
case was obvious; but he never had any spending of his money, and he was
suffering from candy hunger. He was ravenous for the sweets that only on
red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.

He did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew it was sin, and
deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy debauch. Ten
cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being accustomed to the carrying
of money, he lost the ten cents. This occurred at the time when he was
suffering all the torments of conscience, and it was to him an act of
divine retribution. He had a frightened sense of the closeness of an awful
and wrathful God. God had seen, and God had been swift to punish, denying
him even the full wages of sin.

In memory he always looked back upon that as the one great criminal deed of
his life, and at the recollection his conscience always awoke and gave him
another twinge. It was the one skeleton in his closet. Also, being so
made, and circumstanced, he looked back upon the deed with regret. He was
dissatisfied with the manner in which he had spent the quarter. He could
have invested it better, and, out of his later knowledge of the quickness
of God, he would have beaten God out by spending the whole quarter at one
fell swoop. In retrospect he spent the quarter a thousand times, and each
time to better advantage.

There was one other memory of the past, dim and faded, but stamped into his
soul everlasting by the savage feet of his father. It was more like a
nightmare than a remembered vision of a concrete thing--more like the race-
memory of man that makes him fall in his sleep and that goes back to his