And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would.

And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't.

Pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps -- who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning.

It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions.
There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put the light out.
It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent.

I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory.
It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison.
Things had become truly serious.