The church was not full on New Year's Eve, for the weather was so extremely cold that some persons who would otherwise have come, dared not brave the piercing night air. Paul took his usual place in a dark part of the church, where he could see without being much seen. He sat during the prayers, and stared about him. Paul looked at the wreaths and the gas-lights, noticed the fashion of the ladies' bonnets, and amused himself with his own thoughts. There was no reverence either in the posture or in the spirit of Paul. He behaved himself in the house set apart for the worship of the Almighty as he would not have dared to behave in the Queen's palace; nay, as he would not have dared to behave in any gentleman's private dwelling. [Illustration] Paul's body was in church, but his heart was not there. Now he thought of to-morrow's sports, now of his lobster supper. Then the lad's thoughts took a more evil course. Malice and spite were shown in such reflections as these:— "I wonder how that James Barton can bear to stay up till midnight in a church! 'Pray in the New Year,' to be sure! That may be well enough for old folk, who are not likely to live many more years, but young chaps like James and me have fifty or sixty before us, and I can't see the use of all that praying. James wants to be thought better than any one else. He has given up playing skittles on Sundays, and has taken, I hear, to keeping a missionary-box. Catch me following his example! I've something better to do with my pennies. "I don't like James Barton at all. I have owed him a grudge ever since our quarrel in a field three years ago, when he got me into a scrape with a farmer's wife by saying I'd stolen her apples. I've been on the watch ever since to pay him off for that bit of mischievous meddling. If I did take the dame's apples, that was no business of his. Fine fun I had last summer, when I crept up unseen to the neat model of a ship which James had taken weeks to rig out, and tore her sails, and knocked a hole in her keel, while he was wandering about in the brushwood gathering flowers and ferns! I made off as soon as I had done the job, but I'd have liked to have seen the lad's face, when he came to the place where he had left his pretty ship, and found her lying broken and spoiled in the mud! I wonder if he guessed who had played him the trick? He did not see me, I'm sure of that, for I stole away like a fox. I suppose that James has now grown so mighty good that, had I smashed him instead of his ship, he'd have taken it as meek as a lamb. The next time that we meet, I'll try how he likes a box on the ear."