First, it meant no school. He had ceased to picture relief in this matter by the school-house burning some morning, preferably a Monday morning, one second after school had taken in. For a month he had daily dramatised to himself the building's swift destruction amid the kind and merry flames. But Allan, to whom he had one day hinted the possibility of this gracious occurrence, had reminded him brutally that they would probably have school in the Methodist church until a new school-house could be built. For Allan loved his school and his teacher.
But a life of evil promised other joys besides this negative one of no school. In his latest Sunday-school book, Ralph Overton, the good boy, not only attended school slavishly, so that at thirteen he "could write a good business hand"; but he practised those little tricks of picking up every pin, always untying the string instead of cutting it, keeping his shoes neatly polished and his hands clean, which were, in a simpler day, held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic. Besides this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his widowed mother after school; and every Saturday afternoon he went, sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady. This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr. Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors. Such was the barren tale of Virtue's gain. But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this book was one Budd Jackson, who led a life of voluptuous sloth, except at times when the evil one moved him to activity. At these bad moments he might go bobbing for catfish on a Sabbath, or purloin fruit from the orchard of Farmer Haskins (who would gladly have given some to him if he had but asked for it civilly, so the book said); or he might bully smaller boys whom he met on their way to school, taking their sailor hats away from them, or jeering coarsely at their neatly brushed garments. When Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly to his vicious nature. He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor and played a game called pin-pool with a "flashy stranger" at the tavern; hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.