But did they so much as reprove her?
Not they.
She was a moth of peace, rusting in idleness under the kitchen stove or on the back fence, fat, lazy, and full of sin. Like all of her kind, she tempered a career of sloth with occasional deeds of cruelty and blood by day and with diabolical yells at night. Yet she was maintained, a favored pensioner, in the household, under the superstitious delusion that she caught mice, and she would have gone over to the neighbors any day if it had struck her that they were more generous with rations than we were.
My estimate of her was formed the night I heard the screams of a nest of young robins in the apple tree, up which she had dragged her fat body, like an overfed snake, bent on slaughter. And nothing in the vast amount of misleading literature lauding her race has ever succeeded in whitewashing the character of the old reprobate.
The velocipede went away to be repaired, and the minnows departed this life on Monday. On Tuesday I broke the large blade of my jack-knife, and on Wednesday fell in with three boys from the parochial school, who still recalled with animosity their captivity in Peter Bailey's stable.
It was three against one, and I emerged from the encounter with very little glory, a good deal of dust on my clothes, and two or three rather lame spots on my person.
Beyond argument, I had somehow got into disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. At this rate, unless the gods were propitiated, it seemed unlikely that I should survive until the end of the week.
What could I do to win fortune back? Some great stroke was evidently necessary. Ever since Monday, the day of the first catastrophes, I had carefully dropped stones down the culvert under the railway track every time I passed.
Nothing at all had come of it.
Yet it is, as every one knows, a very potent charm indeed. To all who doubt I have only to say that Charley Carter, after dropping stones in the culvert three or four times a week for two years, had, one day, only an hour and a half after dropping a stone, found eleven cents (two nickels and a copper) down in Market Square. But it did not work with me.