STORY OF A BAD LITTLE BOY. 53 



Everything about this boy was curious — everything turned out differently with 

 him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the books. 



Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple-tree to steal apples, and the 

 limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by the 

 farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sick bed for weeks, and repent and 

 become good. Oh ! no ; he stole as many apples as he wanted and came down 

 all right ; and he was all ready for the dog too, and knocked him endways with 

 a brick when he came to tear him. It was very strange — nothing like it ever 

 happened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in 

 them of men with swallow-tailed coats and bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons 

 that are short in the legs, and women with the waists of their dresses under their 

 arms, and no hoops on. Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books. 



Once he stole the teacher's pen-knife, and, when he was afraid it would be 

 found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's cap — 

 poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the village, who 

 always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was fond of his les- 

 sons, and infatuated with Sunday-school. And when the knife dropped from 

 the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed, as if in conscious guilt, 

 and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon him, and was just in the very 

 act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling shoulders, a white-haired, 

 improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike 

 an attitude and say, " Spare this noble boy — there stands the cowering culprit! 

 I was passing the school-door at recess, and unseen myself, I saw the theft com- 

 mitted!" And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice didn't 

 read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and say such a boy 

 deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his home with him, 

 and sweep out the oflBce, and make ftres, and run errands, and chop wood, and 

 study law, and help his wife do household labors, and have all the balance of 

 the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and be happy. No ;' it would 

 have happened that way in the books, but it didn't happen that way to Jim. 

 No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model 

 boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim hated 



