broke and he crept home and to bed realizing that
he alone of all the town was lost, forever and forever.

And that night there came on a terrific storm,
with driving rain, awful claps of thunder and blind-
ing sheets of lighting. He covered his head with
the bedclothes and waited in a horror of suspense
for his doom; for he had not the shadow of a doubt
that all this hubbub was about him. He believed he
had taxed the forbearance of the powers above to
the extremity of endurance and that this was the
result. It might have seemed to him a waste of
pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery
of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous
about the getting up such an expensive thunder-
storm as this to knock the turf from under an insect
like himself.

By and by the tempest spent itself and died with-
out accomplishing its object. The boy's first im-
pulse was to be grateful, and reform. His second
was to wait--for there might not be any more storms.

The next day the doctors were back; Tom had
relapsed. The three weeks he spent on his back
this time seemed an entire age. When he got abroad
at last he was hardly grateful that he had been
spared, remembering how lonely was his estate, how
companionless and forlorn he was. He drifted list-
lessly down the street and found Jim Hollis acting as
judge in a juvenile court that was trying a cat for
murder, in the presence of her victim, a bird. He
found Joe Harper and Huck Finn up an alley eating
a stolen melon. Poor lads! they--like Tom--had
suffered a relapse.

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