As the service had gone on, he might have seen the boy opposite to
him; for there sat Bywater, before the bench of king's scholars,
and right in front of Mr. Pye. Mr. Pye's glance fell upon him now,
and he could scarcely believe it. He rubbed his eyes, and looked,
and rubbed again. Bywater there! and without his surplice! braving,
as it were, the head-master! What could he possibly mean by this act
of insubordination? Why was he not in his place in the school? Why
was he mixing with the congregation? But Mr. Pye could as yet obtain
no solution to the mystery.

The anthem came to an end; the dean had bent his brow at the solo, but
it did no good; and, the prayers over, the sheriff's chaplain ascended
to the pulpit to preach the sermon. He selected his text from St.
John's Gospel: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit." In the course of his sermon he
pointed out that the unhappy prisoners in the gaol, awaiting the
summons to answer before an earthly tribunal for the evil deeds they
had committed, had been led into their present miserable condition by
the seductions of the flesh. They had fallen into sin, he went on, by
the indulgence of their passions; they had placed no restraint upon
their animal appetites and guilty pleasures; they had sunk gradually
into crime, and had now to meet the penalty of the law. But did no
blame, he asked, attach to those who had remained indifferent to their
downward course; who had never stretched forth a friendly hand to
rescue them from destruction; who had made no effort to teach and guide
in the ways of truth and righteousness these outcasts of society? Were
we, he demanded, at liberty to ignore our responsibility by asking in
the words of earth's first criminal, "Am I my brother's keeper?" No; it
was at once our duty and our privilege to engage in the noble work of
man's reformation--to raise the fallen--to seek out the lost, and to