We see him reduced by desperation and modesty to stealing
a pair of overalls. We conceive him to have ruined,
then, his own reputation, and to have utterly disgraced
his family; next, to have engaged in the duello and
to have been spurned by his lady-love, thus lost to
him (according to her own declaration) forever.
Finally, we must behold: imprisonment by the
authorities; the third degree and flagellation.
We conceive our man decided that his career had been
perhaps too eventful. Yet Penrod had condensed
all of it into eight hours.
It appears that he had at least some shadowy perception
of a recent fulness of life, for, as he leaned against
the fence, gazing upon his wistful Duke, he sighed
again and murmured aloud:
“Well, hasn’t this been
A day!”
But in a little while a star came out, freshly lighted,
from the highest part of the sky, and Penrod, looking
up, noticed it casually and a little drowsily.
He yawned. Then he sighed once more, but not
reminiscently: evening had come; the day was over.
It was a sigh of pure ennui.
Next day, Penrod acquired a dime by a simple and antique
process which was without doubt sometimes practised
by the boys of Babylon. When the teacher of his
class in Sunday-school requested the weekly contribution,
Penrod, fumbling honestly (at first) in the wrong pockets,
managed to look so embarrassed that the gentle lady
told him not to mind, and said she was often forgetful
herself. She was so sweet about it that, looking
into the future, Penrod began to feel confident of
a small but regular income.
At the close of the afternoon services he did not
go home, but proceeded to squander the funds just
withheld from China upon an orgy of the most pungently
forbidden description. In a Drug Emporium, near
the church, he purchased a five-cent sack of candy
consisting for the most part of the heavily flavoured
hoofs of horned cattle, but undeniably substantial,
and so generously capable of resisting solution that
the purchaser must needs be avaricious beyond reason
who did not realize his money’s worth.
Equipped with this collation, Penrod contributed his
remaining nickel to a picture show, countenanced upon
the seventh day by the legal but not the moral authorities.
Here, in cozy darkness, he placidly insulted his liver
with jaw-breaker upon jaw-breaker from the paper sack,
and in a surfeit of content watched the silent actors
on the screen.
One film made a lasting impression upon him.
It depicted with relentless pathos the drunkard’s
progress; beginning with his conversion to beer in
the company of loose travelling men; pursuing him through
an inexplicable lapse into evening clothes and the
society of some remarkably painful ladies, next, exhibiting
the effects of alcohol on the victim’s domestic
disposition, the unfortunate man was seen in the act
of striking his wife and, subsequently, his pleading
baby daughter with an abnormally heavy walking-stick.
Their flight—through the snow—to
seek the protection of a relative was shown, and finally,
the drunkard’s picturesque behaviour at the
portals of a madhouse.
