otherwise with this Jim, strangely enough. He ate that jam and said it was bully, in his sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also, and laughed, and observed that "the old woman would get up and snort" when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing anything about it; and she whipped him severely; and he did the crying himself. Everything about this boy was curious: every thing turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the books. Once be 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 be come 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 rock when he came to tear him. It was very strange: nothing like it ever hap pened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats, and bellcrowned 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 penknife; 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 lessons 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 committed." And then Jim didn't get whaled; and the venerable justice didn't read the tear ful 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 office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife to 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 moral boys. Jim said he was "down on them milksops." Such was the coarse language of this, bad, neglected boy. But the strangest things that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get struck by lightning. Why, you might look and look and look through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this. Oh, no! you would find that all the bad boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck by lightning. Boats with bad boys in and it always storms them always upset on Sunday; when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath. How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me. This Jim bore a charmed lite: that must have been the way of it. Nothing could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of tobacco; and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence of peppermint. and didn't make a mistake and drink aqua-fortis. He stole his father's gun, and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his fingers off. He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry; and she didn't linger in pain through long summer days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart. No: she got over it. He ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and gone to decay. Ah, no! he came home drunk as a piper, and got into the station-house the first thing. And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature. So you see there never was a bad James in the Sunday school books that had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life. |