Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/210

 took him past the graveyard late at night.

It was all so intangible, so insubstantial, so bewildering to the untutored imagination. It was a voice from beyond the hills of reality.

Lonely crept stealthily down into the sand-pit, and with not a little trepidation exhumed the buried Bible and Sunday School story. Then he made his way carefully back to the cave, where he flung himself down and turned the two books over and over in his hand, guardedly, apprehensively, as though either of them might still hold imprisoned some terrible and occult power for good or evil.

It was the Bible which he first thrust away from him, hiding it well behind him back in the cave. For was it not the great solemn Book which stood on parlor centre-tables, the book from which terrible sermons were preached, the very arsenal, to his barbarian young mind, of all those stern "Thou Shalt Nots" which so imperiled human existence, and so beset with danger and dread youth's free and natural course?

It is true that he had had his accidental dips into the more rudimentary phases of