Sammy Swattles wasn’t a bad boy, you understand; he was simply
thoughtless. He thoughtlessly did things which robbed him of peace of
mind for some time after he did them.
When Sammy was ten years old he had to leave school, to go to work for
Mr. Greens, the grocer, in order to help support his mother.
He did a great many things for the grocer, from seven o’clock in the
morning till six at night, but his principal work was to place large
paper bags on the scales and fill them with flour from the barrel.
When the bag weighed twenty-three pounds, Sammy had to seal it up and
take it to the family it was ordered for. The grocer allowed him two
cents for every bag he carried, over and above his wages, which were
$2.50 per week. Some weeks Sammy made over $3.00 which helped his mother
to run their little house quite comfortably.
Now, Sammy, in his thoughtlessness, used to sample quite a good deal of
the grocer’s preserved ginger. Every time he would pass the tin boxes of
ginger, he would thoughtlessly take a piece, and it would disappear in
the recesses of Sammy’s rosy mouth.
One night, after he had locked up all but the front door of the store,
he helped himself to quite a large piece of the ginger, and walked home.
He did not care for any supper that night. He felt as if bed was the
best place for his troubled little stomach.
He hadn’t been in bed two minutes when a little fierce man, with a white
cloth round his black body and a huge grin on his ebony face, bounded
into his room.
With a scream Sammy leaped out of bed and bounded out of the window.
With a yell the Indian was after him. Sammy flew down the road like a
runaway colt, the black man in his rear yelling like thunder and lions.
Sammy never ran so fast in his life, but the little black man gained on
him, and finally caught him!
Sammy pleaded hard to be spared to his mother, but the little man grimly
took him by the collar, and with one leap landed him on the island of
Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, at a place called Kandy. Then he led Sammy
out into the country, and blew a whistle. In an instant they were
surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of men, women and boys, all as black
as Sammy’s captor. Sammy cried:
“What have I done! what have I done!” and they all cried:
“You have taken the ginger that we have gathered by hard work, without
permission, and you are condemned to live here for the rest of your life
on ginger alone!”
Then Sammy began to cry real hard, for he thought of his poor mother,
off there in Massachusetts, wondering day after day, “What has become of
my Sammy!”
And then to be compelled to eat nothing but ginger all his life! It was
awful! He already hated ginger. He looked so woebegone that they all
cried:
“If you will promise to be good, and think before you do things, we will
let you go! But if you don’t keep your promise we’ll get you again, and
then, look out!”
So Sammy promised, and ran for home. But the black people seemed to
regret having let him off so easily, and they all came trooping after
him!
You should have seen Sammy run! He went over through India, and across
Afghanistan, Persia and Turkey like a streak of lightning! He plunged
into the Mediterranean and swam across to Italy. From Italy he swam to
Spain; and across Spain, from Tarragona to Cape Finisterre, he ran like
the Rapids of the River St. Lawrence, the black people at his heels!
He was almost exhausted as he dove off Cape Finisterre into the broad
Atlantic, and he would have sunk down deep, for fifteen or twenty miles,
if a friendly dolphin hadn’t come along and invited him to ride on its
shiny back!
The black men gave up the chase then, and the dolphin swam over to
Massachusetts Bay, up Boston Harbor, to the Charles River, to the bridge
by Sammy’s home. There the dolphin said good-by, told Sammy to always be
a good boy, and then, with a flip of its tail, it rushed down the
river—and Sammy awoke!
It had all been a dream, of course; but it cured Sammy of
thoughtlesness, and nobody ever had cause again to say that Sammy
Swattles wasn’t all a nice little boy should be. He told his employer
all about it, and his employer said: “Well, be a good boy, and never do
anything without thinking of whether it’s right or wrong to do it.”
_John Ernest McCann._