struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all 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 them always

upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the

Sabbath. How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.

This Jim bore a charmed life--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 as 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

Sketches New and Old