Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And leap year coming once in four,
February then has one day more.
Re-entering the vestry, he observed on a shelf in a niche a small loaf wrapped in a piece of linen. He felt hungry and commenced to devour the bread, and from a goblet there he drank a little sip of sweet tasting wine. He liked the wine very much, and drank more and more of it.
There was nothing else to be done now in the darkness, so he went on to the soft carpet within the altar rails, and, piling up a few of the praying mats from the choir—little red cushions they were, stamped with black fleur-de-lys, which he admired much in the daylight—he fell asleep.
And he slept long and deeply until out of some wonderful place he began to hear the word “Ruffian, Ruffian,” shouted with anger and harshness. He was pulled roughly to his feet, and apprehension was shaken into his abominable little head.
The morning sunlight was coming through the altar window, and the vicar’s appearance was many-coloured as a wheelwright’s door; he had a green face, and his surplice was scaled with pink and purple gouts like a rash from some dreadful rainbow. And dreadful indeed was the vicar as he thrust the boy down the altar steps into the vestry, hissing as he did, “Take off those things!” and darting back to throw the cushions into proper places to support the knees of the expected devotees.
“Now, how did you get in here?” he demanded, angrily.
The boy hung up the cassock: “Someone locked me in last night, Sir.”
“Who was it?”
“I dunno, Sir, they locked me in all night.”
His interrogator glared at him for a moment in silence, and the boy could not forbear a yawn. Thereat the vicar seized him by the ear and, pulling it with such animation as to contort his own features as well as the child’s, dragged him to the vestry door, gurgling with uncontrolled vexation, “Get out of this. Get out ... you ... you beast!”