LOSING A REPUTATION.
Jack was so overjoyed at getting home again that his plain little room
seemed a palatial residence when he entered it. As long sections of
bare skin were visible through his dried but burned clothing, and as
the latter was also well sprinkled with hay-seed, he made haste to
change his apparel. He really hoped his father would whip him, he had
been so bad, and lest the punishment should not be as heavy as he
deserved he put on very thin clothing, and neglected to put anything
between jacket and skin to temper the blows. If his father did not
punish him, he would punish himself; he would go without pie and cake
for a year, or he would commit to memory a chapter of the Bible every
day. Of course nobody in the village would speak to him now, but he
didn't care, if only he could remain at home, never to go away, not
even when he became a man.
Suddenly, as he emptied the remaining pockets of his burned clothes,
he found the letter which he had intended to mail to his sweetheart
from some convenient post-office. At sight of this his heart gave a
mighty bound, and he retracted his resolution to remain at home all
his life, unless, indeed, his mother might be brought to fully approve
the choice of his heart. He would lose no time in consulting both his
parents about this affair of the affections, and he counted it as a
sin that he had not done so long before. What very different people
from what he had supposed them to be, that night had taught him his
father and mother were!
The expected punishment not manifesting itself, Jack ventured out of
his room and stood upon the back piazza to look at the garden, which
suddenly appeared to him to be the finest garden that the world ever
knew—the garden of Eden excepted, perhaps.
From here he listened to the breakfast bell, and wondered if any bread
and water would be sent to him; if not, he would at least have the
consolation of knowing that he didn't deserve any. But suddenly his
father shouted that his breakfast would be cold if he didn't eat it
soon, so Jack descended, in a maze, to the nicest breakfast he had
ever seen, and oh! wonder of wonders, his father gave him a cup of
coffee, a luxury which he had been taught to forego, because the
doctor thought it very injurious to growing boys with large heads.
Jack occasionally stole a loving look at both parents, but it pained
him greatly to discover for the first time, that his father looked as
if he was going to be an old man, and he was confused by seeing his
mother's eyes fill with tears at short intervals.
When breakfast was over, the doctor went into his office without
saying a word to Jack, and Mrs. Wittingham, first kissing her boy,
went to her household affairs, and Jack felt very uncomfortable. He
was too full to be silent, but it was not the sort of fullness, so
often experienced, that could be relieved by whistling, or singing, or
dancing, or teasing the family cat. He was absolutely longing to pay
the penalty of his misdeeds, and he was determined not to be the cause
of any delay, so he followed his father into the office—a thing he had
never done before in his life in the face of impending conflict. The
doctor was surprised beyond measure by this unexpected demonstration,
and his astonishment increased as Jack, after lounging about
uncomfortably for a few moments, suddenly exclaimed:
"Father, I want to be punished."
"Bless me!" exclaimed the doctor, turning so suddenly that a powder
which he was preparing dusted all over his clothing. "Have you lost
your senses, my boy?"
"No, sir," said Jack, hanging his head. "I guess I've just found them.
I've been a dreadfully bad boy, and I think I deserve to be punished
severely."
"Well," said the doctor, after several moments of silent contemplation
of his boy, "that's the strangest case I ever heard of."
The doctor dropped the paper which had held the powder, hurried to the
desk, took out the notes for his work on heredity, and made the
following memorandum: "It is undeniable that the mental, like the
physical nature, sometimes generates a quality utterly different from
itself." Then the doctor erased this, and re-wrote and amplified it.
The second form did not satisfy him entirely, so again he erased and
wrote, and repeated the process several times. As he was making his
sixth erasure he became conscious that Jack had lounged up to his
elbow.
"Oh!" said the doctor, "you said you wanted to be punished, didn't
you?"
"Yes, sir."
The doctor wanted to say "Confound it!" but he habitually refrained
from such remarks before his boy; as he looked back to his doubly
scrawled page, however, he unconsciously penned "Confound it!"
directly after his late erasure, and he followed it with exclamation
points to the end of the line.
"What do you think should be done to you?" asked the doctor, finally.
"I don't know," said Jack, "but it ought to be something dreadful, for
I've been so bad."
"Why did you get drunk?"
"I didn't mean to do it," said Jack, "but that's just the way with
everything I do," and Jack explained the affair with the
brandy-bottle.
"You did something worse than get drunk when you took that brandy, my
boy," said the doctor.
"I suppose so," said Jack; "I always do something worse. But I don't
know what it was."
"You showed yourself to be a coward," replied the doctor. "What do you
think of cowards?"
"They'd have called me a coward if I hadn't drunk it," said Jack.
"Yes," said the doctor, "and that's what you were cowardly about,
can't you see?"
Jack admitted that he could.
"Wouldn't it have taken more bravery to have laughed and fought down
such a charge, than it required to drink the liquor?" asked the
doctor.
"Yes, sir. And I want to be punished for being a coward too."
"Goodness!" exclaimed the doctor, seizing his hat and vanishing. A few
minutes later the Reverend Mr. Daybright, just as he had entered his
study, received a call from Dr. Wittingham, and the doctor promptly
proceeded to detail Jack's case and ask for advice. Now Mr. Daybright
belonged to a denomination which has very pronounced ideas on the
subject of sin and punishment, and the minister preached as his church
believed, and was sure that he believed what he preached, yet he
counselled the doctor to let the boy alone.
"But he wants to be punished," urged the doctor.
"What good can it do him?" asked the minister; "if he is in that frame
of mind, the sole object of punishment is attained in advance."
"But he has done wrong; he has kept his mother and me in intolerable
misery for twenty-four hours, and it seems to me that something should
be done to him."
"Ah!" said the minister, "you're thinking about revenge, which is very
different from punishment. And it is my duty, as your pastor, to urge
you to give up the thought at once, for it is unchristian and brutal."
"Why," said the doctor, flushing angrily, "I don't want to punish him;
I simply think it a matter of duty."
"Yes," sighed the minister, "revenge has generally been considered a
duty, so great is the influence of inheritance even upon minds
intentionally honest."
The doctor abruptly departed, muttering to himself:
"That's a point for the book, any how!"
Arrived at his office, the doctor found Jack still there. He picked
the boy up in his arms, and as Jack mentally submitted to whatever was
to be his fate, his father sat down, hugged the boy close, and said:
"My darling fellow, tell me what I can do to keep you out of further
mischief and trouble. That shall be your punishment."
The exquisite sarcasm of the potter questioning his clay did not
strike Jack, which is not very strange, as the doctor himself was
unconscious of it. But Jack could only say:
"I don't know."
"I would sell everything I own, if money would do it," said the
doctor.
Jack was still unable to answer, but the doctor's assertion caused the
boy to squeeze closer to his father's breast, which movement greatly
comforted the old gentleman.
"I think if you'd always let me be with you, father, I would be a real
good boy," said Jack. "I like you better than I do anybody—but Matt;
yes, better than Matt either."
"Thank you, my boy," said the doctor, with some little coolness which
Jack detected.
"I've got to do something," said Jack, "and if I can't see things
that's good to do, I have to do others."
The doctor remembered having had some such experience himself, in the
days of his own mischief-making, but he answered gravely:
"I have to spend a great deal of time in sickrooms, my boy, where it
would be inconvenient for you to be."
"Then let me be with you when you're at home," said Jack, "and," he
continued, rather hesitatingly, "let me ask questions, and you try to
answer so I can understand you."
The doctor dimly realized that when he was busy he did not answer
questions willingly or lucidly, but he replied:
"You ask a great many questions about things which I don't think you
should know about, Jack."
"Well," said Jack, "I can't help thinking about them, and when you
turn me off, I nearly always ask somebody else and I find out anyhow."
The idea that other people should be telling his boy about matters
which he declined informing him upon was a blow to the doctor's
self-respect, and his sense of propriety, too, for he knew what class
of people Jack would be likely to apply to for information, and the
nature of the answers which would be given. The doctor pondered a
little while, and then said:
"Jack, how would you like to learn a trade? You could be with me in
the evenings, you know."
"What sort of a trade?" said Jack.
"Whatever you like," said the doctor, "I wouldn't for anything have
you at any that was distasteful to you. You certainly like to use
tools—you have ruined all of mine in various ways."
"I think I'd like to be a carpenter," said Jack.
"Then you shall," said the doctor. "If you like it, and stick to it,
I'll set you up as a builder when you learn it, but the moment you
grow sick of it I want you to let me know. You are smart enough to
become a good architect, and that's a more profitable profession than
mine."
"May I have tools of my own?" asked Jack.
"Yes," replied his father, "the best that money can buy. And I will go
right away and find some one who will teach you."
The doctor went straightway to the best builder in the neighborhood,
and had the proposition civilly but promptly declined.
"Every boy I ever took managed to ruin all my best tools within a
year," explained the builder, "to say nothing of the lumber which he
worked up into fancies of his own, and ruined by failures of one sort
and another."
"I'll buy my boy the best and largest set of tools that you can
select," said the doctor.
For a moment this offer seemed an inducement to the builder, for there
were many tools which he disliked to buy yet needed occasionally to
use; he might borrow from the promised outfit. But as he thought
further, he replied:
"You're very fair, but tools aren't everything. If I do the square
thing by the boy, I must use a great deal of time in teaching him, and
time is money. My time is worth a great deal more than the boy's work
will be for a couple of years."
"I'll pay you cash for your time," said the doctor; "I'll give you a
thousand dollars in advance, if you say so."
This offer staggered the builder, prosperous though he was, for where
is the man who does not want a thousand dollars?
But still the builder hesitated, and the doctor asked:
"What else do you want?"
"Well," said the builder, prudently retiring to the doorway of a house
he was building, "what I want is to tell you something that maybe you
won't like, but I can't help taking it into consideration. They do
say—_I_ don't say it, mind, but I've heard it from a good many—that
Jack is the worst boy in town."
"It's a lie!" roared the doctor. "He's the best—that is, he has the
best stuff in him. He's never quiet; he learns his lessons as quickly
as a flash; he hates work about the house, just as I'll warrant you
did when you were a boy, and he must do something. He likes to handle
tools, though, and wants to be a carpenter."
"Liking is all very well," said the builder, "but sticking to work
don't naturally follow."
"Did you ever hear of his dropping a job of mischief until he had
thoroughly finished it?" asked the doctor.
"No," answered the builder with great promptness.
The final result was that sundry papers and moneys passed between the
doctor and the builder, and on the following Monday morning, Jack was
at work at seven o'clock nailing planking upon a barn. The news got
about town very rapidly, and by noon there were at least twenty boys
looking at the unexpected spectacle, and tormenting Jack with ironical
questions. When night came Jack's hand felt as if it could never grasp
a hammer again, and he was otherwise so weary that he declined,
without thanks, an invitation to go with the other boys to serenade a
newly-married couple with horns and bells. Then he helped shingle a
portion of the roof of the new barn, but his mind was greatly
distracted by the awkwardness of a boy, in an adjoining pasture, who
was trying to braid together the tips of the tails of two calves; the
consequence was that he had progressed so short a distance with his
own row of shingles that the other workmen had gone across the barn
and returned to start afresh, and, as they rested until Jack got out
of the way, they ungratefully upbraided him because of his slowness,
and he wasn't going to be called slow again, not for all the calves'
tails in the universe.
--------------
This book might have been continued indefinitely, had it not been that
Jack was steadily at work which he liked, and had a great deal of his
father's society out of working hours. Gaining these, he lost his
reputation for being the worst boy in town, for although he remained
for several years a boy and a very lively one, he had something
besides mischief to exercise his busy brain upon, and a boy cannot be
honestly busy and mischievous also, any more than he can eat his cake
and have it too. Even the doctor and Mrs. Wittingham reformed, though
it was very hard for the latter to stop fretting at the boy, and for
the former to cease acting as if his son, like his horse, merely
needed food, rest and correction.
Jack did not go about preaching reform to the boys and advising them
all to be carpenters, but he unconsciously talked from a standpoint
very different from that which he had habitually occupied in other
days, and his talk came gradually to exert considerable influence
among the boys, though they seldom noticed the change themselves.
Jack's very title, "The Worst Boy in Town," was in considerable danger
of lapsing for lack of a successor, and the inhabitants of Doveton are
still undecided as to where it belongs.
As for the doctor's great work on heredity, it is not in print yet,
for the doctor happened one day, while mourning over a neglected and
consequently unproductive Bartlett pear tree, to drift into some
analogies between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, with the result
that he realized that if the splendid hereditary tendencies of the
tree could not prevent its bareness and its running to superfluous
wood, there could be no hope of an untrained boy, even if he was a
scion of the Wittingham stock. This idea took such entire possession
of the doctor that he went into the house and burned his manuscript as
far as completed, and all the notes beside.
According to Jack, who professes to be an infallible authority on the
subject, nice little Mattie Barker grows nicer every day, and she has
promised to change her name in the course of time, and her parents
have endorsed her decision, for though Jack is not yet of age, steady
boys who are also bright, and have learned a business which is not
akin either to gambling or theft, are not numerous enough to be
despised. And Jack has a whole portfolio full of cottage plans, all of
his own designing, over which he and Mattie spend long and industrious
evenings, and Jack has taken a solemn vow that when the proper plan is
decided upon, and the building begins, Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel shall be
the sole hod-carrier, and shall be paid the highest market rates for
his services.
Being practically a successful man, Jack is the receptacle for the
confidences of hosts of his old playmates, who feel that their good
qualities are not appreciated by a world which is quick to complain of
their occasional irregularities, but he has sent many of these youths
sadly away by remarking:
"It doesn't matter how many good qualities are inside of a fellow, if
only his bad ones make themselves lively on the surface."
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Transcriber's note:
○ Punctuation, hyphenation and spelling were made consistent when
a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise they were
not changed.