To the Lord's Prayer he added various petitions of his own.

He prayed that he might be a good boy and live a long time and go to Heaven when he died and see his mother; that the next Saturday might be sunny all day long, and that the end of the world might not come while he was alive.
It was during Vandover's first year at the High School that his eyes were opened and that he acquired the knowledge of good and evil.

Till very late he kept his innocence, the crude raw innocence of the boy, like that of a young animal, at once charming and absurd.

But by and by he became very curious, stirred with a blind unreasoned instinct.

In the Bible which he read Sunday afternoons, because his father gave him a quarter for doing so, he came across a great many things that filled him with vague and strange ideas; and one Sunday at church, when the minister was intoning the Litany, he remarked for the first time the words, "all women in the perils of child-birth." He puzzled over this for a long time, smelling out a mystery beneath the words, feeling the presence of something hidden, with the instinct of a young brute.