The Worst Boy in Town

nding a complicated and consequently a favorite prescription of his own, and

e had been correctly handed down, but a man's memory is not in the habit of going backward half a lifetime, unless in search of old

able to find the original stock at all, and as for the improvements I intend to make in it, well, they're as invisible as the ailments of some of my rich patients. Whatever I say to him seems to filter through him more rapidly than that mixture is doing through the paper, and leaves not even a sediment behind, while whatever he shouldn't hear seems to stick to him like an adhesive plaster. Before he goes to school, he recites his lessons to me in the most perfect manner; when he comes home he brings a written complaint from the teacher, who has found him outrageously mischievous all day lon

door, and the town supe

the doctor, briskly. "Who

on 'less its you. Here's a little bill I'm sorry

r from the Supervisor's

Doveton, Dr. One-half cost of repl

" exclaimed the doctor after r

hat bridge that Jack and Matt hooked, you know, and left in the m

octor, "I don't understand. Jack n

d it through one fence after another, an' at last they got it aground. We tried to get it under a log wagon an' haul it back, but 'twas no go, an' we havn't put the hire of the wagon into the bill, for the man wasn't to charge anything if he di

arked that the price seemed a large one for a

came to $23.25, an' in dividin' I threw the odd cent on to Bolt

g. Then he went to the door and shouted "Jack!" in tones which would hav

the youth appeared, "I've just had to p

promptly ans

and cents, as stealing," said the doctor. "

ly for a minute or tw

two, I

a day of hard, disgusting work. Do you consider that the fair

stly contrite in the presence

y did yo

cau

use w

cau

scamp, and don't care for an

" said Jack, begin

uld be paid, to make up the cost of that bridge, and do it on your holidays and Saturdays, too. Now I

a mere tithe of the patience and love that Heaven had been compelled to display in reforming him, he might have attached Jack to him by that love which is the best of all educators in things wise and thoughtful.

here'll be that much school time gone, but I say—Matt ought to be made to help—oh, wouldn't that be jolly! I'll

; as he entered, the proprietor, who was a

rascally body. Don't you ever dare to coax my boy to go anywhere wi

volunteered assistance, and an hour later the boys had burning upon the bridge a glorious fire of dead boughs and broken rails. When the boards had burned in two, the boys pried the two logs toward each other, and thereafter they adjusted the logs several times, getting each time some smut upon their cloth

at people in this world a

Matt, "but what made y

ay that big mulatto Ijam, that he can never collect his bills of, came in looking awful ugly, and blazing about being sued, and I was sure he meant to hurt father; I just got a hatchet and stood outside the door, ready to

same way, somet

h decision in the negative) whether he should te

, I don't know what, until I earn enough money to pay my share of tha

o!" excla

d catch it when you go home, but there's some bully mullein leave

flection to this topic; then his sense of co

punishes me in the same way. What

, as he generally does in June, and he always has it cut while its green because it costs only a dollar and a quarter

tt, "it will take you more t

Besides, I've got an idea worth more than my own industry. I'm going to blow

ame thing about

hing worth having—a half dollar against half a dime, say—that I can chop and split more in a single day than any other boy in town. Lots of them will take up the bet, we'll appoin

is own arithmetic class, numbering twenty-nine. The boys from the other school hoped they were not to be excluded just because they lived in a different part of the town, and Matt went on a special mission to them to assure them that this was to be, figuratively speaking, an international contest, in which all territorial lines were to be as if they existed not. Some other boys who never went to school, hardened young rowdies, who, as a rule did nothing, and accumulated a large stock of vitality which was not always expended in proper ways, heard of the approaching match,

would be the most available time, particularly as Jack explained that his father who, he was sure, would stop the whole thing if he heard of it in advance, would start before daylight that morning to attend a consultation

cut the ten cords of winter wood as an offset to the bridge bill of eleven dollars and sixty-two cents. The doctor patted Jack's h

t for that work on heredity; Impose a rational penalty for offense, and its manifest ju