Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book.  He wanted to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor beggar-woman with six children, and telling her to spend it freely, but not to be extravagant, because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him magnanimously refusing to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for him around the corner as he came from 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.