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