Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/211

 scriptural lore. On a few rare occasions he had even attended church, of his own free will, creeping into the huge and shadowy Cowansburg edifice with a hunted and startled look, to be overawed by the tremulous roll and thunder of the pipe-organ, and to be charmed into emitting from his cacophonous young throat an intoxicating verse or two of the choir's hymn. But church, he explained in his more intimate moods, always "choked him up." It gave him the same feeling as did the little white satin-lined coffin in the show-window of Chamboro's leading furniture-dealer and undertaker—a dim and shivery sense of depression. His Sabbath School training, unhappily, had been most irregular and spasmodic, and always suspiciously synchronous with the advent of the annual picnic to Cowan's Grove. Indeed, his last term of attendance had been brought to an untimely close through a purely innocent and above-board retort of Lonely's, who, when asked by his teacher if he was not delighted to have a little baby sister arrive in his family, honestly and openmindedly asserted that he would much rather have had a pup. This remark created such an uproar that