It took all the courage Jack had to carry those three sandwiches to the Hotel Dantzic and to put them away, untouched, in his traveling-bag. After a while he went down to the reading-room and read; but he went to bed thinking of the excellent meals he had eaten at the Albany hotel on his way to New York.
Mary Ogden's second Sunday in Mertonville was a peculiar trial to her, for several young ladies who expected to be in the Academy next term, came and added themselves to that remarkable Sunday-school class. So did some friends of the younger Academy girls; and the class had to be divided, to the disappointment of those excluded.
"Mary Ogden didn't need to improve," said Elder Holloway to the Superintendent, "but she is doing better than ever!"
How Jack did long to see Mary, or some of the family in Crofield, and Crofield itself! As soon as he was dressed he opened the bag and took out one of his sandwiches and looked at it.
"Why, they're smaller than I thought they were!" he said ruefully; "but I can't expect too much for five cents! I've just twenty cents left. That sandwich tastes good if it is small!"
So soon was it all gone that Jack found his breakfast very unsatisfactory.
"I don't feel like going to church," he said, "but I might as well. I can't sit cooped up here all day. I'll go into the first church I come to, as soon as it's time."
He did not care where he went when he left the hotel, and perhaps it did not really make much difference, considering how he felt; but he found a church and went in. A young man showed him to a seat under the gallery. Not until the minister in the pulpit came forward to give out a hymn, did Jack notice anything peculiar, but the first sonorous, rolling cadences of that hymn startled the boy from Crofield.
"Whew!" he said to himself. "It's Dutch or something. I can't understand a word of it! I'll stay, though, now I'm here."
German hymns, and German prayers, and a tolerably long sermon in German, left Jack Ogden free to think of all sorts of things, and his spirits went down, down, down, as he recalled all the famines of which he had heard or read and all the delicacies invented to tempt the appetite. He sat very still, however, until the last hymn was sung, and then he walked slowly back to the Hotel Dantzic.