Everybody laughed. I thought grandmother’s eye wandered round the circle, as if half taking it all in earnest, and half hoping some hand would go up. But no hand went up.
“Billy always was hard on his clothes,” she said, with a sigh. “If he only keeps well I won’t say a word; but there’s always danger of boys eating unwholesome things, where there’s nobody to deny them.”
“Billy’s stomach’s his own, and he must learn to have the care of it,” said Mr. Carver.
Mr. Carver seemed a very quiet, thoughtful man, and of quite a different turn from his brother.
I suggested that boarding-house diet was apt to be plain; and then told grandmother about a nephew of mine, a nice boy, who was rather older than her grandson, who was named after me, and of whom I thought everything. I told her he had been away at school a year, and that he enjoyed himself, and went ahead in his studies, and never had a sick day, and came home with better manners than he had when he went away. As this pleased her, I said everything I could think of about my nephew, including some anecdotes of little Silas, when he was quite small; and she told a few about William Henry, the others helping her out, now and then, with some missing items.
Uncle Jacob said he shouldn’t dare to say how many times she’d been frightened almost to death about Billy. Many and many a time she was sure he was lost, or drowned, or run over, or carried off, and would never come back alive; but he always managed to come out straight at last. Uncle Jacob said that if all the worry that was worried in this world were piled up together, ’t would make a mountain; but if all of it that needn’t be worried were knocked off, what was left wouldn’t be bigger than a huckleberry hill.
Mr. Carver said there was one thing which made him entirely willing to trust William Henry away, and that was, he had always been a boy of principle. “I have watched him pretty closely,” said Mr. Carver, “and have noticed that he has a kind of pride about him that will not permit him to lie, or equivocate in any way.”
“That’s true!” cried Aunt Phebe. “True enough! Billy don’t always look fit to be seen, but he isn’t deceitful. I’ll say that for him!”
“When he went to our school,” said Matilda, “and was in the class below me, and there was a fuss among the boys, and all of ’em told it a different way, the teacher used to say she would ask William Henry, and then she could tell just how it happened.”
“He couldn’t have a better name than that,” said Mr. Carver.