Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed.
Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was
a large black beetle with formidable jaws--a "pinchbug," he called it. It
was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to
take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went
floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went
into the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs,
unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out
of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in
the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came
idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the
quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the
drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around
it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew
bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly
snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy
the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws,
and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent
and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin
descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp,
a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards
away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators
shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and
hand-kerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish,
and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a
craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on
it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his
fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at
it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But
he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a
fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close
to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the
beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony
and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so
did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew
down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the
home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was
but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of
light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang
into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of
distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.
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By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with
suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill.
The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all
possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest
sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of
unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson
had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole
congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced.
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