frightened.

The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all boys
he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes awakened
cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the door of his
room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and coughed, he
trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was taken with a
fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was walking on the
trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost souls that shrieked
with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one come into his room and
heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.

On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came over
him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt that there
was something missing in his life, something he wanted very badly.

Under John Telfer's influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised so
jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and be so
filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing
open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his
white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine
impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was
absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and
listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang
to his eyes.

Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and the