“Let me know the next story he tells; I’ll cure him,” said Mr. Morton, sternly. “You now how I broke Tom of it. Spare the rod, and spoil the child. And where I promised to be kind to the boy, of course I did not mean that I was not to take care of his morals, and see that he grew up an honest man. Tell truth and shame the devil—that’s my motto.”
“Spoke like yourself, Roger,” said Mrs. Morton, with great animation. “But you see he has not had the advantage of such a father as you. I wonder your sister don’t write to you. Some people make a great fuss about their feelings; but out of sight out of mind.”
“I hope she is not ill. Poor Catherine! she looked in a very bad way when she was here,” said Morton; and he turned uneasily to the fireplace and sighed.
Here the servant entered with the supper-tray, and the conversation fell upon other topics.
Mrs. Roger Morton’s charge against Sidney was, alas! too true. He had acquired, under that roof, a terrible habit of telling stories. He had never incurred that vice with his mother, because then and there he had nothing to fear; now, he had everything to fear;—the grim aunt—even the quiet, kind, cold, austere uncle—the apprentices—the strange servants—and, oh! more than all, those hardeyed, loud-laughing tormentors, the boys of his own age! Naturally timid, severity made him actually a coward; and when the nerves tremble, a lie sounds as surely as, when I vibrate that wire, the bell at the end of it will ring. Beware of the man who has been roughly treated as a child.
The day after the conference just narrated, Mr. Morton, who was subject to erysipelas, had taken a little cooling medicine. He breakfasted, therefore, later than usual—after the rest of the family; and at this meal pour lui soulager he ordered the luxury of a muffin. Now it so chanced that he had only finished half the muffin, and drunk one cup of tea, when he was called into the shop by a customer of great importance—a prosy old lady, who always gave her orders with remarkable precision, and who valued herself on a character for affability, which she maintained by never buying a penny riband without asking the shopman how all his family were, and talking news about every other family in the place. At the time Mr. Morton left the parlour, Sidney and Master Tom were therein, seated on two stools, and casting up division sums on their respective slates—a point of education to which Mr. Morton attended with great care. As soon as his father’s back was turned, Master Tom’s eyes wandered from the slate to the muffin, as it leered at him from the slop-basin. Never did Pythian sibyl, seated above the bubbling spring, utter more oracular eloquence to her priest, than did that muffin—at least the parts of it yet extant—utter to the fascinated senses of Master Tom. First he sighed; then he moved round on his stool; then he got up; then he peered at the muffin from a respectful distance; then he gradually approached, and walked round, and round, and round it—his eyes getting bigger and bigger; then he peeped through the glass-door into the shop, and saw his father busily engaged with the old lady; then he began to calculate and philosophise, perhaps his father had done breakfast; perhaps he would not come back at all; if he came back, he would not miss one corner of the muffin; and if he did miss it, why should Tom be supposed to have taken it? As he thus communed with himself, he drew nearer into the fatal vortex, and at last with a desperate plunge, he seized the triangular temptation,—
“And ere a man had power to say ‘Behold!’
The jaws of Thomas had devoured it up.”
Sidney, disturbed from his studies by the agitation of his companion, witnessed this proceeding with great and conscientious alarm. “O Tom!” said he, “what will your papa say?”
“Look at that!” said Tom, putting his fist under Sidney’s reluctant nose. “If father misses it, you’ll say the cat took it. If you don’t—my eye, what a wapping I’ll give you!”
Here Mr. Morton’s voice was heard wishing the lady “Good morning!” and Master Tom, thinking it better to leave the credit of the invention solely to Sidney, whispered, “Say I’m gone up stairs for my pocket-hanker,” and hastily absconded.