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
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