When Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly to his vicious nature.

He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor and played a game called pin-pool with a "flashy stranger" at the tavern; hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.
This touch about the circus, well-intended, to be sure, was yet fatal to all good the tale might have done the little boy.

Clytie, who read most of the story to him, declared Budd Jackson to be "a regular mean one." But in his heart Bernal, thinking all at once of the circus, sickened unutterably of Virtue.

To drive eight spirited white horses, seated high on one of those gay closed wagons--those that went through the street with that delicious hollow rumble--hearing perchance the velvet tread, or the clawing and snarling of some pent ferocity--a leopard, a lion, what not; to hear each day that muffled, flattened beating of a bass drum and cymbals far within the big tent, quick and still more quickly, denoting to the experienced ear that pink and spangled Beauty danced on the big white horse at a deathless gallop; to know that one might freely enter that tented elysium--if it were possible he would run off with a circus though it meant that he had the morals of a serpent! Now, eastward from the big house lay the village and its churches: thither was tame virtue.

But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance.