Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/225

 Lonely had judiciously disposed of his collection of birds' eggs, wondering how he had the heart, even in his unregenerate days, to indulge in an amusement so cruel to any of God's creatures. He had likewise for all time given up smoking, and one rainy afternoon in the Barrisons' stable even reproved Lionel Clarence for his surreptitious and unseemly indulgence in the weed.

It gave his heart a wrench to think that he had to part with his old friend Gilead, but as he went over the long list of the goat's transgressions, he saw there was no help for it, and wondered just how and where he could get rid of an offender so notorious and so steeped in all the cunning of well-seasoned crime. His first inclination was to build a funeral pyre, and offer him up as a living sacrifice, after the fashion of the righteous of olden times. This seemed to him, however, both an unalleviated cruelty and an uncommendable monetary sacrifice. So he temporized over the point until, to his unspeakable relief, he discovered that Abraham himself had been an honored and respected keeper of goats. Finding his case bolstered up with so substantial a precedent,