VII.
The place was the Common, where his trouble had begun. He looked
back to the beginning, and could see that it was his own fault. To
be sure, you might say that if a fellow came along and offered to
pay you fifty cents for changing a ten-dollar bill, you had a right
to take it; but there was a voice in Lemuel's heart which warned him
that greed to another's hurt was sin, and that if you took too much
for a thing from a necessitous person, you oppressed and robbed him.
You could make it appear otherwise, but you could not really change
the nature of the act. He owned this with a sigh, and he owned
himself justly punished. He was still on those terms of personal
understanding with the eternal spirit of right which most of us lose
later in life, when we have so often seemed to see the effect fail
to follow the cause, both in the case of our own misdeeds and the
misdeeds of others.
He sat down on a bench, and he sat there all day, except when he
went to drink from the tin cup dangling by the chain from the
nearest fountain. His good breakfast kept him from being hungry for
a while, but he was as aimless and as hopeless as ever, and as
destitute. He would have gone home now if he had had the money; he
was afraid they would be getting anxious about him there, though he
had not made any particular promises about the time of returning.
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