It wasn’t any great fun, you’d better believe, to lie on a lounge and stick in the house and see Will going everywhere and having no end of jolly times every day.
Then when the Saturday came for him to go back to Dr. Thomas’s and leave me behind, and I thought of seeing all the fellows and hearing what they had for presents and all that, I concluded that if I’d been well I’d have been glad for once in my life even to go back to school. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough done for me either, for mother and Jennie, the cook, almost cured me of ever liking cream cakes and jam again, by the heaps of it they gave me. Nell made me more neckties than I can wear in ten years, and played backgammon by the hour. Father brought me a new book from the city nearly every night, and Jim told me more stories—“yarns” he called them—and he and I made the most complete man-of-war that ever was seen in these parts. So you can see that I was not neglected, but I tell you there’s nothing like being well and having two whole legs to stand on. I’d got pretty tired of reading and jig-sawing and painting, and one afternoon I’d been telling them about the time we broke Bob Richards in at school, and says Jim:
“Tom, old fellow,” says he, “why don’t you write a story. Write it all out, and send it to Wide Awake; you never know what you can do till you try,” says he.
I thought I couldn’t at first, but the next day Jim had to drive over to Medford, and Nell had to go too to match mother’s gray dress and get some red ribbons for the dog. They both went off, and mother had a caller down stairs, so I was left all alone, and that’s how I came to write about it anyway.
You see our fellows have always had a fashion of giving the new boys a “breaking in.” The thing began by just doubling up the bed clothes, or sewing up the fellow’s sleeves, and then they got to ducking them and scaring them with ghosts, and when at last they pumped on little Fred Harris and frightened him into brain fever, Dr. Thomas forbade anything more of the sort.
Now when Dr. Thomas says anything he has a way of meaning it, so we fellows were surprised enough when one day Jeff Ryder came into the gym where we were having a circus, and said: “I tell you what let’s do! Let’s give Bob Richards a regular breaking in!”
“Yes I would, Jeff,” said Harry Thorndike, in the odd, quiet way he had with him. Harry Thorndike was our head boy, and entered Harvard last summer. “Yes, I would,” says he, “and get sent home for a month; it would be no end of fun. I would.”
Of course we boys all looked at Jeff when Harry spoke in that way, to see if he didn’t feel cheap, but he didn’t, a bit.
“I’ll take all the blame,” says he, “and I’ll risk being sent home.”
So then he told us all about his plan, and we thought it was a jolly good one too.