or two. But he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good boys, after they had gotten a prodigious number of golden stars, were each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black Bible, with his name—Gilbert Shotwell Harden—stamped on the cover in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to you out of the blue sky! Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got farther than "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into proclaiming it.
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac, and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the housetops;—all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked, and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of drinking down wine or beer.
