"David, you shall! I'm not going to have you going about all day
with a headache. Eat! And then when you've finished your breakfast,
go and find out which station that officer Baker belongs to, and he
can tell you something about the boy, if any one can."
Sewell made what shift he could to grasp these practical ideas, and
he obediently ate of whatever his wife bade him. She would not let
him hurry his breakfast in the least, and when he had at last
finished, she said, "Now you can go, David. And when you've found
the boy, don't you let him out of your sight again till you've put
him aboard the train for Willoughby Pastures, and seen the train
start out of the depot with him. Never mind your sermon. I will be
setting down the heads of a sermon, while you're gone, that will do
_you_ good, if you write it out, whether it helps any one else
or not."
Sewell was not so sure of that. He had no doubt that his wife would
set down the heads of a powerful sermon, but he questioned whether
any discourse, however potent, would have force to benefit such an
abandoned criminal as he felt himself, in walking down his brown-
stone steps, and up the long brick sidewalk of Bolingbroke Street
toward the Public Garden. The beds of geraniums and the clumps of
scarlet-blossomed salvia in the little grass-plots before the
houses, which commonly flattered his eye with their colour, had a
suggestion of penal fires in them now, that needed no lingering
superstition in his nerves to realise something very like perdition
for his troubled soul.
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