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child should lead them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great
spectacle were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the
principal character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the thought,
and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was a tame lion.
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 “pinch-bug,” 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 handkerchiefs, 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
forepaws 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.

By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed
laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead stand-still. The discourse was
resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all possibility of