wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him."

This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to

Jacob in all his life. A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had

never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open

the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift, it never had in

any book that ever HE had read. He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according

to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he was around

hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old

iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which

they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament

with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails. Jacob's heart

was touched. He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded

grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by

the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just

at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad

boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began

one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always

commence with "Oh, sir!" in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good

or bad, ever starts a remark with "Oh, sir." But the alderman never

waited to hear the rest. He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him

around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in

an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away

toward the sun, with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after

him like the tail of a kite. And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or

Sketches New and Old