"Bad luck to the mischief of these boys!" said his mother. "I see he'll never be able to go with me to church this day; so he may as well keep to his bed."
Glad enough was Dennis to creep back to his nest.
Mike Hennessy and Johnny Hart were not in so bad a plight, but they were unable to go to church.
As the boys were lying through the long hours oppressed with the languor that follows such wild excitement, and with aching bones, their reflections upon the frolic and its consequences were by no means consoling. Nor did the comparisons they drew between the lawful sports of the play-ground and the reckless turbulence of "tip-top times" fail to decide the question in favor of the more quiet enjoyments.
Was it a pale phantom that sat by the bedside of each during those hours—while the joyful bells of the great feast were sending forth their jubilant peals—and searching his very soul with reproachful eyes pointed an uplifted finger from the painful realities of the now to the calm vision of what might have been, had he followed the voice of conscience and the requirements of duty, until he shrunk affrighted from the picture? Ah! no, my boys; it was no phantom; it was the only reality in the sight of which these mortal frames of ours subside to dust, and in comparison with the permanence of which they become—with all their importunate sensibilities, their worldly ambitions, their earthly cravings, and their fleeting pleasures—but the "baseless fabrics of a dream!" It was the tender, vigilant, and ever-present friend of the sinner; his best friend, his other self—his conscience! destined to be the crowning joy of his home in heaven, or to be exchanged at the portals of death for remorse, the gnawing "worm that never dies," in the regions of "eternal despair"! Woe to that boy who sins, and who fails to receive, in his first solitary hours, a visit from the reproving monitor, or to profit by its awakening and warning voice!
The next morning they were so much better that they could go to school, and meeting George Wingate in the yard, he exclaimed, "Why, boys, where were you yesterday, that you did not come to church? Henry and I looked for you through the whole crowd, to invite you to go with us to the farm. Pat Casey went, and we had the best kind of a time; we were so sorry you were not with us!"
They replied that they were not well, and had to stay at home. George noticed their embarrassment, and that the face of Dennis betrayed bruises about the eye, while Mike's forehead and Johnny's nose displayed traces of a similar nature, and he conjectured the cause of their absence from church.
After school, as he and Henry were walking home, Henry remarked, "I suspect, George, that wherever the boys went that afternoon, they had a rousing fight, for ever so many of them show the marks of it. I heard a man telling that there was a great row among the boys at the show in H—— that night; and I shouldn't wonder if our fellows were among them."
"We need not trouble ourselves about it," George replied; "but I thought at the time it was very likely we might be thankful we were called another way, and had nothing to do with their frolic. I've noticed that when boys go off by themselves in pursuit of fun, they seldom come out the better for it; and as for enjoyment, there is just none at all. I wouldn't give one hour of such pleasure as we found in the woods for the wildest frolic they can get up."
"Nor I either," said Henry; "I'm determined I won't have any part in their scrapes hereafter. If no other trouble followed, the shame of going to confession after a wild row is enough to destroy all the pleasure."