They might adore father and mother,
and yearn to be better friends with papa: but there was the old
Adam, a quickening evil spirit; there were his imps always in the
way, confound them! I myself lived, with excellent grandparents,
for several years on pretty close terms with Hell and an
all-seeing Eye; until I grew so utterly weary of both that I have
never since had the smallest use for either. Some of you may have
read, as a curious book, the agreeable history called "The
Fairchild Family," in which Mr Fairchild leads his naughty
children afield to a gallows by a cross-road and seating them
under the swinging corpse of a malefactor, deduces how easily
they may come to this if they go on as they have been going. The
authors of such monitory or cautionary tales understood but one
form of development, the development of Original Sin. You stole a
pin and proceeded, by fatal steps, to the penitentiary; you threw
a stick at a pheasant, turned poacher, shot a gamekeeper and
ended on the gallows.
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