“You can’t play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps.  Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw.  But Ma didn’t do it on purpose, I guess.  She never had the mumps and didn’t know how discouraging a pickle is.  Darn if I didn’t feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick.  But about Pa.  He has been fuller’n a goose ever since New Year’s day.  I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year’s.  Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone.  We have got brain, and know when we have got enough, but Pa, when he gets to going don’t ever stop until he gets so sick that he can’t keep his stummick inside of hisself.  It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa up every time he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he will never touch liquor again.  I scared him so his bald head turned gray in a single night.”

“What under the heavens have you done to him now?” says the grocery man, in astonishment.  “I hope you haven’t done anything you will regret in after years.”

“Regret nothing,” said the boy, as he turned the lid of the cheese box back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of cheese, and took a few crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a soap box by the stove, “You see Ma was annoyed to death with Pa.  He would come home full, when she had company, and lay down on the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a distillery.  It hurt me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of drinking if she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt Pa to go ahead, and I promised not to.  Then I got my chum and another boy, to help, and Pa is all right.  We went down to the place where they sell arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a saw mill, or a threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we borrowed some arms and legs, and fixed up a dissecting room.  We fixed a long table in the basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you know, and then we got false whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa came in the house drunk and lay down on the sofa, and got to sleep, we took him and laid him out on the table, and took some trunk straps, and a circingle and strapped him down to the table.  He slept right along all through it, and we had another table with the false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and smoked pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a man.

“Well, you’d a dide to see Pa look at us when he woke up.  I saw him open his eyes, and then we began to talk about cutting up dead men.  We put hickery nuts in our mouths so our voices would sound different, so he wouldn’t know us, and was telling the other boys about what a time we had cutting up the last man we bought.  I said he was awful tough, and when we had got his legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up,