used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but
they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. As I said before,
they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was "afflicted,"
and so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm
to come to him.

This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his
greatest delight. This was the whole secret of it. He believed in the
good little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; he had every
confidence in them. He longed to come across one of them alive once;
but he never did. They all died before his time, maybe. Whenever he
read about a particularly good one he turned over quickly to the end to
see what became of him, because he wanted to travel thousands of miles
and gaze on him; but it wasn't any use; that good little boy always died
in the last chapter, and there was a picture of the funeral, with all his
relations and the Sunday-school children standing around the grave in
pantaloons that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and
everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard and a half
of stuff in them. He was always headed off in this way. He never could
see one of those good little boys on account of his always dying in the
last chapter.

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