him, and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say, “Spare this noble boy—­there stands the cowering culprit!  I was passing the school door at recess, and, unseen myself, I saw the theft committed!” And then Jim didn’t get whaled, and the venerable justice didn’t read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and say such boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him come and make his home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and have all the balance of the time to play and get forty cents a month, and be happy.  No it would have happened that way in the books, but didn’t happen that way to Jim.  No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys.  Jim said he was “down on them milksops.”  Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy.

But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn’t get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday and didn’t get struck by lightning.  Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this.  Oh, no; you would find that all the bad boys who go boating on Sunday invariably get drowned; and all the bad boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck by lightning.  Boats with bad boys in them always upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath.  How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.

This Jim bore a charmed life—­that must have been the way of it.  Nothing could hurt him.  He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of tobacco, and the elephant didn’t knock the top of his head off with his trunk.  He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and didn’t make a mistake and drink aqua fortis.  He stole his father’s gun and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn’t shoot three or four of his fingers off.  He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry, and she didn’t linger in pain through long summer days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart.  No; she got over it.  He ran off and went to sea at last, and didn’t come back and find himself sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and gone to decay.  Ah, no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into the station-house the first thing.

And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature.