Higher rose the sun, and higher rose your wrath. Happily scratched the poultry, and viciously you scratched, with the rake. What was your life, anyway, but one unremitting round of coercion! Who cared whether you had any fun? Nobody! Other boys could do as they chose; but not you. No; not you. You were always being made to do things that you didn’t want to do. You were nothing but a slave. And you would submit to it no longer.
The darned old fools! You would show them! You would run away!
Then—then (you hoped) would come upon that household the time when, gathered together, one member would say to another:
“I wish that Johnny was here.”
“Yes,” would confess father; “if he were only here he might go fishing whenever he pleased. I would be kinder to him; the yard could wait.”
“And I, too,” would quaver mother. “I understand, now. I used to send him after a yeast-cake, and never think how tired he must be.”
“And I’d never mind again his being in the kitchen,” would sob Maggie the girl. “No, indeed. He should have all the cake and lumps of brown sugar he wanted.”
“Oh, Johnny, Johnny!” would wail all. “Come back and try us once more. We’ll be so different.”
But they would plead too late. You would be far away; perhaps at the very moment dying, unknown, miserable, forlorn and forsaken; dying in the gutter or by the roadside, of starvation and exposure; and the people who found you would inquire, among themselves, pityingly:
“Who is he? Has he no friends?”