“That boy didn’t know how to handle fireworks, you bet,” put in Robbie.
“He may have been a natural born idiot for anything we know,” remarked Bearington. “He was too good and beautiful to live anyway, according to their account.”
“Papa, how bu’ful do I have to be to be too bu’ful to live?” asked little Teddy coming up and laying his curly head lovingly on his father’s knee.
“Like a lamb for the slaughter,” thought his mother. She broke out afresh:
“Powder and dynamite are always more or less dangerous, papa.”
“Never you mind, Tishy. They are safe enough if rightly handled; and right enough, too, when they are put to the right uses.”
“What’s the use of powder and die-a-mite except to celebrate the Fourth with, papa?” asked Joey.
“Die-a-mite! do you hear that Tishy?” laughed Bearington. “Well sonny, they are good to blast the rocks with and the English too and send them flying up hill and down, if they should meddle with our affairs as they did before the revolutionary war and have tried to do, two or three times since.”
“Keeo!” shouted Robbie. “Skippetty hop! Hoppetty skip! Bow-wow! Bow-wow!” In response to his call, the three other boys joined him and they went “skippetty hop” into the back yard to worry Colonel Jordan’s English terrier.
Query. Was it the inward cussedness of the boy nature that led them on to this species of brute torture, or was it their father’s injudicious talk?