school, and welted him so over the head with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, “Hi! hi!” as he proceeded.  That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens.  He wished to be put in a Sunday-school book.  It made him feel a lithe uncomfortable sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died.  He loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about being a Sunday-school-boo boy.  He knew it was not healthy to be good.  He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good as the boys in the books were he knew that none of them had ever been able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in a book he wouldn’t ever see it, or even if they did get the book out before he died it wouldn’t be popular without any picture of his funeral in the back part of it.  It couldn’t be much of a Sunday-school book that couldn’t tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was dying.  So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best he could under the circumstances—­to live right, and hang on as long as he could and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.

But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys in the books.  They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it all happened just the other way.  When he found Jim Blake stealing apples, and went under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy who fell out of a neighbor’s apple tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out of the tree, too, but he fell on him and broke his arm, and Jim wasn’t hurt at all.  Jacob couldn’t understand that.  There wasn’t anything in the books like it.

And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the blind man did not give him any blessing at all, but whacked him over the head with his stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then pretending to help him up.  This was not in accordance with any of the books.  Jacob looked them all over to see.

One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog that hadn’t any place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and bring him home and pet him and have that dog’s imperishable gratitude.  And at last he found one and was happy; and he brought him home and fed him, but when he was going to pet him the dog flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except those that were in front, and made a spectacle of him that was astonishing.  He examined authorities, but he could not understand the matter.  It was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it acted very differently.  Whatever this boy did he got into trouble.  The very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about the most unprofitable things he could invest in.