Tom scored his accounts, and resolved to keep to the
very letter of his reform, and never to put that will
in jeopardy again. He had three hundred dollars
left. According to his mother’s plan, he
was to put that safely away, and add her half of his
pension to it monthly. In one year this fund
would buy her free again.
For a whole week he was not able to sleep well, so
much the villainy which he had played upon his trusting
mother preyed upon his rag of conscience; but after
that he began to get comfortable again, and was presently
able to sleep like any other miscreant.
The boat bore Roxy away from St. Louis at four in
the afternoon, and she stood on the lower guard abaft
the paddle box and watched Tom through a blur of tears
until he melted into the throng of people and disappeared;
then she looked no more, but sat there on a coil of
cable crying till far into the night. When she
went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between the
clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to
wait for the morning, and, waiting, grieve.
It had been imagined that she “would not know,”
and would think she was traveling upstream. She!
Why, she had been steamboating for years. At
dawn she got up and went listlessly and sat down on
the cable coil again. She passed many a snag
whose “break” could have told her a thing
to break her heart, for it showed a current moving
in the same direction that the boat was going; but
her thoughts were elsewhere, and she did not notice.
But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than
usual brought her out of her torpor, and she looked
up, and her practiced eye fell upon that telltale
rush of water. For one moment her petrified gaze
fixed itself there. Then her head dropped upon
her breast, and she said:
“Oh, de good Lord God have mercy on po’
sinful me—I’S SOLE DOWN DE RIVER!”
Even popularity can be overdone.
In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets
that Michelangelo died; but by and by, you only
regret that you didn’t see him do it. —
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
JULY 4. Statistics show that
we lose more fools on this day than in all the
other days of the year put together. This proves,
by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July
per year is now inadequate, the country has grown
so. — Pudd’nhead Wilson’s
Calendar
The summer weeks dragged by, and then the political
campaign opened —opened in pretty warm
fashion, and waxed hotter and hotter daily. The
twins threw themselves into it with their whole heart,
for their self-love was engaged. Their popularity,
so general at first, had suffered afterward; mainly
because they had been TOO popular, and so a natural
reaction had followed. Besides, it had been diligently
whispered around that it was curious—indeed,
VERY curious—that that wonderful knife
