Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/350



AMES," asked his mother as she was getting him ready for Sunday-school, "have you forgotten that verse I taught you yesterday?"

James, who had just turned six, had a memory like his father (and that was a very bad one—so said James's mother). She had picked out next to the shortest verse in the Bible—"It is I; be not afraid!"—and had attempted to teach it to James, who was to repeat it when his teacher should call the class roll.

"Now, James darling, let me hear your verse," coaxed his mother as she struggled with the last button of his waistband.

James studied very hard for a second, and brightened perceptibly—he gazed straight into his mother's eyes and shouted triumphantly,

"It's me—don't git skeered!"

OBERT had been taught to eat what was set before him without any complaint. Expressions of aversion were especially forbidden. One day when a dish of rice pudding, which he particularly disliked, was passed to him he was heard to say, thoughtfully,

"There's jus' three kinds of pudding I like—mince pie an' squash pie an' gum!"

ASTER Tom comes home at sundown with the water of the old swimming-pool dropping like crystals from his short curly hair onto the nape of his neck. His mother is getting their supper in the hot, stuffy kitchen.

"Tom," she exclaimed when her eyes fell on him peeping in at the open door, "come right here to me," and she drew him up under the lamp's rays for closer inspection.

"Goodness me! your shirt's on wrong side out! Don't tell me—you've been to that old swimmin'-pool agin. Or else, how'd that shirt o' yours git turned on your back?"

In spite of the evidence that would have hanged him before a dozen jurymen, Master Tom gazed roguishly up into his mother's frowning face and explained, "Maw, I must 'a' turned it gettin' over the fence!"