Two little California boys were arrested at Reno for horse thieving.
They had started from Surprise Valley with a cavalcade of thirty
animals, and disposed of them leisurely along their line of march,
until they were picked up at Reno, as above explained. I don’t feel
quite easy about those youths—away out there in Nevada without their
Testaments! Where there are no Sunday School books boys are so apt to
swear and chew tobacco and rob sluice-boxes; and once a boy begins to
do that last he might as well sell out; he’s bound to end by doing
something bad! I knew a boy once who began by robbing sluice-boxes, and
he went right on from bad to worse, until the last I heard of him he
was in the State Legislature, elected by Democratic votes. You never
saw anybody take on as his poor old mother did when she heard about it.
“Hank,” said she to the boy’s father, who was forging a bank note in
the chimney corner, “this all comes o’ not edgercatin’ ’im when he was
a baby. Ef he’d larnt spellin’ and ciferin’ he never could a-ben
elected.”
It pains me to state that old Hank didn’t seem to get any thinner under
the family disgrace, and his appetite never left him for a minute. The
fact is, the old gentleman wanted to go to the United States Senate.