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representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor
beggar-woman with six children, and telling her to spend it freely, but
not to be extravagant, because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him
magnanimously refusing to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for
him around the corner as he came from school, and welted him so over the
head with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, "Hi! hi!" as he
proceeded. That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens. He wished to
be put in a Sunday-school book. It made him feel a little uncomfortable
sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died. He
loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about
being a Sunday-school-book boy. He knew it was not healthy to be good.
He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good
as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had ever been
able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in
a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out
before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral
in the back part of it. It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book that
couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was
dying. So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best
he could under the circumstances--to live right, and hang on as long as
he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.
But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing
ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys
in the books. They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the
broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it
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