“I don’t want your cent.  I don’t sell flag!”

John was intensely mortified.  “I suppose,” he said, “she thought I was a sort of beggar-boy.  To think of selling flag!”

At any rate, he walked away and left the cent in the road, a humiliated boy.  The next day he told Jim Gates about it.  Jim said he was green not to take the money; he’d go and look for it now, if he would tell him about where it dropped.  And Jim did spend an hour poking about in the dirt, but he did not find the cent.  Jim, however, had an idea; he said he was going to dig sweet-flag, and see if another carriage wouldn’t come along.

John’s next rebuff and knowledge of the world was of another sort.  He was again walking the road at twilight, when he was overtaken by a wagon with one seat, upon which were two pretty girls, and a young gentleman sat between them, driving.  It was a merry party, and John could hear them laughing and singing as they approached him.  The wagon stopped when it overtook him, and one of the sweet-faced girls leaned from the seat and said, quite seriously and pleasantly: 

“Little boy, how’s your mar?”

John was surprised and puzzled for a moment.  He had never seen the young lady, but he thought that she perhaps knew his mother; at any rate, his instinct of politeness made him say: 

“She’s pretty well, I thank you.”

“Does she know you are out?”

And thereupon all three in the wagon burst into a roar of laughter, and dashed on.

It flashed upon John in a moment that he had been imposed on, and it hurt him dreadfully.  His self-respect was injured somehow, and he felt as if his lovely, gentle mother had been insulted.  He would like to have thrown a stone at the wagon, and in a rage he cried: 

“You’re a nice....” but he could n’t think of any hard, bitter words quick enough.

Probably the young lady, who might have been almost any young lady, never knew what a cruel thing she had done.

XI

HOME INVENTIONS

The winter season is not all sliding downhill for the farmer-boy, by any means; yet he contrives to get as much fun out of it as from any part of the year.  There is a difference in boys:  some are always jolly, and some go scowling always through life as if they had a stone-bruise on each heel.  I like a jolly boy.

I used to know one who came round every morning to sell molasses candy, offering two sticks for a cent apiece; it was worth fifty cents a day to see his cheery face.  That boy rose in the world.  He is now the owner of a large town at the West.  To be sure, there are no houses in it except his own; but there is a map of it, and roads and streets are laid out on it, with dwellings and churches and academies and a college and an opera-house, and you could scarcely tell it from Springfield or Hartford,—­on paper.  He and all his family have the fever and ague, and shake worse than the people at Lebanon; but they do not mind it; it makes them lively, in fact.  Ed May is just as jolly as he used to be.  He calls his town Mayopolis, and expects to be mayor of it; his wife, however, calls the town Maybe.