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 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 office, and make fires, 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 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 thing 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

Sketches New and Old