It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent.  I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory.  It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect:  doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!—­Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time!  The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison.

Things had become truly serious.  I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if I survived to see its sun appear.  I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after.  I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard—­ and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, I would go for a missionary.

The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster—­my own loss.

But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem’s account and nobody’s else.  The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf.  I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm.

That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, ‘Dutchy’ was drowned.  Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school.  He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory.  One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned.