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anything else about the discourse. However, this time he was really
interested for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving
picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the
millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a
little 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 "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;
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