John Habberton

“ The stalwart appearance of some of the larger contestants terrified certain small, weak and lazy boys into determining to throw up the sponge in advance, but when the challenger, the boastful Jack himself, sauntered out from the house with an axe on his shoulder, a toothpick in his mouth and an intolerable air of self-sufficiency in his face, the nerves of the most timid boy grew suddenly as fine as steel, and he determined to drop dead on his axe rather than let that bragging Jack crow over him any longer. ”

“ Thirty-nine axes came down nearly as one, and four saws began a not discordant quartette across the bark of sundry sticks, while the three unemployed men thrust their hands deep into their pockets and adjured the boys, collectively, to "go in." A chip from fat Billy Barker's axe started to avenge Billy upon his tormentor of an hour before, and it struck the loafer in the back of the neck with such force that the bad boy howled with anguish, and volubly condemned his soul to all sorts of uncomfortable places and conditions. ”

“ The ways of Peter came to his mind, both reproachingly and in comfort, for he remembered that Peter had behaved valiantly after discovering what a blatant, white-livered sort of a fellow he was, and Jack, to stifle his conscience, was willing for the moment to believe that if he himself swore, lied and put in a general denial, the evil might be excusable for the sake of the good it might bring. ”

“ He could not foresee that the Pinkshaw twin—hang him!—would get angry, and stamp over that coat as he struck the winner—for that was undoubtedly the time, when, under the crunching of the Pinkshaw shoe-heel, the matches were ignited. Why couldn't the old jacket have burned up, instead of remaining to tell tales? What could have brought the gunmaker, usually so industrious, to view so uninteresting an object as a burned stable, and how came he to walk just where he could espy his own saw? ”

“ The doctor started to ask if either he or his wife were not always at home, but recalling the drift of a previous conversation on the same topic, he grew suddenly very cool and undemonstrative and removed himself, whereupon Jack, who read the human face as correctly as boys usually do, waxed angry, and lost sight of all his principles, as every one does in anger, and determined that if he could not have fun with the boys he would have it without them, and have all he wanted, too. ”

“ Then one of the loafers, whose family owned no timepiece, lounged up, and made Billy very uncomfortable with prophecies that a certain boy would hardly escape melting on such a warm day as that particular Saturday promised to be, and that only a pair of leg boots could be trusted to save enough of the remains to justify a full sized funeral. Then one of the country boys appeared, riding bareback upon an ancient mare, and his extreme taciturnity became as annoying to Billy as the chaffing of the loafer had been, while the loafer himself visibly abated his arrogance by a degree or two. ”

“ He even threw his own arms about the doctor with a mighty grip, considering how young the boy was.
"Think of your mother, too," pleaded the doctor. "She has suffered more for you than you ever can for yourself, and she is dreadfully feeble and nervous; do try to lighten the load which at best must be very heavy to her."
"I will," said Jack; "indeed I will. I'll darn all my own stockings."
"And," said the minister, who wished all things done decently and in order as established by Providence, "pray daily for grace to overcome every sin."
"I always do," said Jack, "but it don't always work." ”

“ Then all the stars of heaven forsook their orbits and dashed about each other in a manner which made Jack too giddy to look at them, so he looked straight before him at the steeple of the Presbyterian Church, just in time to see it dissolve itself into two steeples, which trembled awhile and then indulged in a mad strife to see which should overtop the other. The antics which Hoccamine's store indulged in were very dangerous to a brick structure which had been erected by contract, as that had. ”

“ Old Nokkerman turned speedily to perceive only several rows of solemn-faced unregenerates, Jack's eye being the only one he could catch, so he shook his fist warningly at the general line of occupants of the back seats, and then resumed his blissful manifestations as quickly as if the religious ecstacy were a mere habit which could be assumed or laid aside at will. ”

“ He at first determined to not even answer any boy who spoke to him, but this led to his being called "Proudy," and "Codfish," and "Bloated Aristocrat." All this was very galling to a youth who considered himself as pre-eminently a man of the people. Then, one day, as he was hoeing potatoes in the family garden, half a dozen boys leaned on the fence for an hour, and shouted themselves hoarse by exclaiming in concert, "Tombstone!" To hold one's tongue, as Jack did throughout the infliction, is to prove one's self a possessor of a high degree of self-control. ”

“ Then every carpenter who owned a boy of wood-chopping age suddenly missed his best oil stone, and sundry axes had their edges dressed so keenly that no one denied their owner's assertions that a man might shave himself with those axes and not know but they were rabbit paws or puff balls. ”

“ I've reached an age when I am easily affected by anything unusual, whether it is good or bad, and everything I hear about you upsets me."
"Nobody ever says anything about the good things I do, mother," complained Jack.
Mrs. Wittingham remembered to have had some such thought at certain times in her own life, when her good deeds were regarded as actual matters of course, whereas her petty imperfections had been causes of complaint and unkindness. But to admit such a thing would be to give the boy sympathy, and should wrong-doers have the consolation which sympathy would afford? ”

“ Being practically a successful man, Jack is the receptacle for the confidences of hosts of his old playmates, who feel that their good qualities are not appreciated by a world which is quick to complain of their occasional irregularities, but he has sent many of these youths sadly away by remarking:
"It doesn't matter how many good qualities are inside of a fellow, if only his bad ones make themselves lively on the surface." ”

“ Boys are no more likely than adults to resist Satan when he appears as an angel of light, so Matt speedily agreed to go as soon as he had prepared a day's supply of firewood.
"Got another axe, and I'll help you," said Jack, and within five minutes those two boys were making chips fly at a rate which would have been the wonder of a hired wood-chopper, while Matt's mother, who happened to glance through a window wondered why Jack's father could accuse that boy of laziness. ”

“ Of the quartette which remained, Jack was outwardly the most cheerful and careless, but inwardly—well, he could not help thinking of the Spartan boy who allowed a fox to prey upon his vitals while he was denying any knowledge even of the existence of a fox anywhere nearer than the Apennines. Ruling in hell might have its social advantages over serving in heaven, but in whatever location a man may be, there will the appropriate mental temperature be also. ”

“ Arrived at the little church, Jack found that his companion would not have lacked congenial society even had he come alone, for in the back seats were already congregated several boys of respectable parentage, and a loafer or two besides, as well as half a dozen adults who frequently occupied back seats in churches. Jack would have retired at once, but the famous Vater Offenstein had just ascended the pulpit, removed his coat, laid it across the desk and opened the Bible, and Jack, who was just then full of sympathy with all believers of the Word, was anxious to observe the old man's method. ”

“ Lazy George Crayton remarked that he had brought some torpedoes which he had saved over from the fourth of July, but none of them had exploded when he threw them, perhaps because in the church he could not get good elbow-room when he threw.
Jack had determined not to make any more trouble, but if there was anything which he despised above all others, it was a person who could never think of but one way to do a thing. So he reproached George Crayton with being a dunderhead, and George replied that if somebody was smarter than somebody else, perhaps somebody would have the kindness to show how. ”

“ The doctor had been a boy himself, a third of a century before, and an extremely lively one, if the traditions of his native village had been correctly handed down, but a man's memory is not in the habit of going backward half a lifetime, unless in search of old sweethearts, so the doctor owned to himself that Jack was without exception the most mischievous boy he had ever known or heard of. ”

“ This brilliant device took complete possession of Matt, and as for Jack, within a week there was not a boy in town who could pass him without making a face at him, and scarcely a mother dependant upon her own boys for fuel but had an abundant supply without having to beg for it. Many indignant boys offered indefinite bets in favor of their own skill with the axe, but the sagacious Jack declined them all on the ground that he could not honorably bet on what he called a sure thing. ”

“ Every body knew who threw them, but when questioned by the teacher they all, with general mental reservation, professed utter ignorance. The exile-teacher was not of the best temper, so he took his stand near a window, with the text-book in one hand and half a brick in the other, but Jack, warned by friendly hands hanging out of the windows of the side upon which the teacher stood, operated from the other side and occasioned many spirited races against time, the teacher's course being across the schoolroom, while Jack's goal was the friendly shelter of the schoolhouse porch. ”

“ As for the doctor's great work on heredity, it is not in print yet, for the doctor happened one day, while mourning over a neglected and consequently unproductive Bartlett pear tree, to drift into some analogies between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, with the result that he realized that if the splendid hereditary tendencies of the tree could not prevent its bareness and its running to superfluous wood, there could be no hope of an untrained boy, even if he was a scion of the Wittingham stock. ”

“ There is always a fever with arms broken above the elbow, and if you excite yourself it will come on too soon, and it may destroy your reason."
"I wish it would," sobbed Jack, "I'd a great deal rather be crazy than lie here in my senses all through this jolly, awful month. I can't pick a blackberry, and I can't have any money for Christmas, and I know Frank Parker guesses one of the new baits I was going to try on the perch, and it'll be just like him to go and catch every one of them. ”

“ The first man notified was Jack, and as that youth had an utter abhorrence of loneliness he suggested to the Pinkshaw twin that he should name the Dead House blackberry patch as a safe place of rendezvous, inasmuch as nobody would be likely to go there, the blackberry season being over, there being no contagious disease raging in town, and the house being off the road to any where. ”

“ Jack had not the strength to resist or devise any way of reducing, without exposure, the protrusion of that one of his pockets which held the buttons. How he wished that the lately despised shirt buttons, so small, so insignificant, had constituted the whole body of the previous evening's currency, instead of its being inflated by the huge papier-mache sailor buttons from the Pinkshaw twin's jacket. ”

“ We should have made ourselves more companionable to Jack, but instead of that, we've only tried to make him a person like ourselves. We're so bound up in our own round of daily affairs that we've never paid much attention to him except when he has got himself into mischief."
"I'm sure I've always seen that he had food and clothing, and you have sent him to school, and given him everything he's asked for that was within reason."
"Within our reason, yes," said the doctor, "but I remember to have had tastes different from my parents, when I was a boy, and they were not at all bad, either." ”

“ Had the adventurers been other than boys, they would have turned back at once, but when a boy gets a project clearly into his head he never gives any one an excuse to say that the mule is the most obstinate of all living animals. Jack soon grew impatient of his slow progress, and conceived a brilliant idea. Raising himself to his feet on a rail of reasonable flatness (for a fence rail) he steadied himself with his rod, and accomplished with safety and celerity the trip to the angle where the rail terminated. ”

“ Then there slowly developed within him the thought that Nuderkopf, who had been the principal sufferer by the trick of the speaking-tube, was not even a member of the despised Puttytop faction; so Jack, like many another mischief-maker who injures some one of whom he had never thought while planning his departures from rectitude, sought refuge from his conscience by plunging into gloomy reverie upon the fateful lack of sequence in earthly affairs. ”

“ Just then the Wittingham servant came to the door, holding aloft in one hand a stocking and in the other a dirty pack of cards and the knife, exclaiming:
"The loike av this was undher masther Jack's pillow, ma'am."
"That's my boy's knife!" exclaimed Mr. Pinkshaw.
"Are the cards his, too?" asked the doctor. "I hope so, for the sake of Jack's back."
"They were his," said Jack, determining that all hope for concealment was past. "I won them from him at poker, and won the knife and the buttons too."
"It's a lie!" shouted Mr. Pinkshaw. "My boys have their faults, but they never gamble." ”

“ But I don't see why I'm the worst boy in town. I declare. If it isn't just the morning to go fishing—warm, cloudy, worms easy to get. I wish't was Saturday, so there wouldn't be any school, and I wish school teachers knew what fun it is to go fishing; then they'd be easier on a fellow who played hookey, and they'd ask him where he caught them, and how many, and how big they were, instead of picking up their everlasting switches and making themselves disagreeable. Perch would bite splendidly to-day, and there are people in this town who'd be glad to have a good mess of perch. ”