take any interest in any kind of rational amusement. So the other boys

used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but

they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. As I said before,

they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was "afflicted,"

and so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm

to come to him.

This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his

greatest delight. This was the whole secret of it. He believed in the

good little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; he had every

confidence in them. He longed to come across one of them alive once;

but he never did. They all died before his time, maybe. Whenever he

read about a particularly good one he turned over quickly to the end to

see what became of him, because he wanted to travel thousands of miles

and gaze on him; but it wasn't any use; that good little boy always died

in the last chapter, and there was a picture of the funeral, with all his

relations and the Sunday-school children standing around the grave in

pantaloons that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and

everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard and a half

of stuff in them. He was always headed off in this way. He never could

see one of those good little boys on account of his always dying in the

last chapter.

Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He wanted

to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie

to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures

Sketches New and Old