 | The fiend's delight |  |
Boys who Began Wrong.
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
is, the old gentleman wanted to go to the United
States Senate.
| The fiend's delight | |