Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw some bad boys starting off pleasuring in a sailboat.  He was filled with consternation, because he knew from his reading that boys who went sailing on Sunday invariably got drowned.  So he ran out on a raft to warn them, but a log turned with him and slid him into the river.  A man got him out pretty soon, and the doctor pumped the water out of him, and gave him a fresh start with his bellows, but he caught cold and lay sick abed nine weeks.  But the most unaccountable thing about it was that the bad boys in the boat had a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the most surprising manner.  Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like these things in the books.  He was perfectly dumfounded.

When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on trying anyhow.  He knew that so far his experiences wouldn’t do to go in a book, but he hadn’t yet reached the allotted term of life for good little boys, and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could hold on till his time was fully up.  If everything else failed he had his dying speech to fall back on.

He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go to sea as a cabin-boy.  He called on a ship-captain and made his application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, “To Jacob Blivens, from his affectionate teacher.”  But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and he said, “Oh, that be blowed! that wasn’t any proof that he knew how to wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn’t want him.”  This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to Jacob in all his life.  A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift it never had in any book that ever he had read.  He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it.  Nothing ever came out according to the authorities with him.  At last, one day, when he was around hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails.  Jacob’s heart was touched.  He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones.  But just at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in.  All the bad boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always commence with “Oh, sir!” in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good or