“The old fury!” muttered the panting Johnny between his clenched teeth, looking fiercely towards his uncle’s room.

“To break his own pipe!” exclaimed Alie.  “I never knew him do anything like that before, however angry he might be!”

Johnny took down his cap from its peg, and, in as ill humour as can well be imagined, went out to search for his ball.  He took what revenge he could on his formidable uncle, while amusing himself that afternoon by looking over his “Robinson Crusoe.”  Johnny was fond of his pencil, though he had never learned to draw; and the margins of his books were often adorned with grim heads or odd figures by his hand.  There was a picture in “Robinson Crusoe” representing a party of cannibals, as hideous as fancy could represent them, dancing around their fire.  Johnny diverted his mind and gratified his malice by doing his best so to alter the foremost figure as to make him appear with a wooden leg, while he drew on his head a straw hat, unmistakably like that of the old sailor, and touched up the features so as to give a dim resemblance to his face.  To prevent a doubt as to the meaning of the sketch, Johnny scribbled on the side of the picture,—­

    “In search of fierce savages no one need roam;
    The fiercest and ugliest, you’ll find him at home!”

He secretly showed the picture to Alie.

“O Johnny! how naughty!  What would uncle say if he saw it?”

“We might look out for squalls indeed! but uncle never by any chance looks at a book of that sort.”

“I think that you had better rub out the pencilling as fast as you can,” said Alie.

“Catch me rubbing it out!” cried Johnny; “it’s the best sketch that ever I drew, and as like the old savage as it can stare!”

Late in the evening their mother returned from Brampton, where she had been nursing a sick lady.  Right glad were Johnny and Alie to see her sooner than they had ventured to expect.  She brought them a few oranges, to show her remembrance of them.  Nor was the old sailor forgotten; carefully she drew from her bag and presented to him a new pipe.

The children glanced at each other.  Jonas took the pipe with a curious expression on his face, which his sister was at a loss to understand.

“Thank’ee kindly,” he said; “I see it’ll be a case of—­

    “’If ye try and don’t succeed,
    Try, try, try again.’”

What he meant was a riddle to every one else present, although not to the reader.

The “try” was very successful on that evening and the following day.  Never had Johnny and Alie found their uncle so agreeable.  His manner almost approached to gentleness,—­it was a calm after a storm.

“Uncle is so very good and kind,” said Alie to her brother, as they walked home from afternoon service, “that I wonder how you can bear to have that naughty picture still in your book.  He is not in the least like a cannibal, and it seems quite wrong to laugh at him so.”