NICKEY’S SOCIAL AMBITIONS
To Nickey, the Maxwells were in the nature of a revelation. At his impressionable stage of boyhood, and because of their freedom from airs and graces of any kind, he was quick to notice the difference in type—“some class to them; not snobs or dudes, but the real thing,” as he expressed it. His ardent admiration of Donald, and his adoration of Mrs. Betty, gave him ambition to find the key to their secret, and to partake of it.
He was too shy to speak of it,—to his mother last 171 of all, as is the nature of a boy,—and had to rely on an observant and receptive mind for the earlier steps in his quest. When Maxwell boarded with them, Nickey had discovered that he was won’t to exercise with dumb-bells each morning before breakfast. The very keenness of his desire to be initiated, held him silent. A visit to the town library, on his mother’s behalf, chanced to bring his eyes—generally oblivious of everything in the shape of a book—upon the title of a certain volume designed to instruct in various parlor-feats of physical prowess.
The book was borrowed from the librarian,—a little shamefacedly. The next morning Mrs. Burke was somewhat alarmed at the noise which came from Nickey’s room, and when there was a crash as if the chimney had fallen, she could stand it no longer, and hurried aloft. Nickey stood in the middle of the floor, clad in swimming trunks, gripping a large weight (purloined from the barn) in either hand, very red in the face, and much out of breath.
As the door unexpectedly opened he dived for bed and pulled the clothes under his chin.
“Land Sakes!” Hepsey breathed, aghast. “What’s all this about? If there’s a nail loose in the flooring I can lend you a hammer for the asking,” and she examined several jagged dents in the boards. 172
“Say ma,” urged Nickey in moving tones. “If I’d a pair of dumb-bells like Mr. Maxwell’s, I c’d hold onto ’em. I’ve pretty near smashed my feet with them things—gosh darn it,” he added ruefully, nursing the bruised member under the clothes.
“I guess you can get ’em, next time you go to Martin’s Junction; but if it’s exercise you want,” his parent remarked unsympathetically, “there’s plenty of kindlin’ in the woodshed wants choppin’.”
She retired chuckling to herself, as she caught a glimmer of what was working in her son’s mind.
The “reading habit” having been inculcated by this lucky find at the library, it was not long before Nickey acquired from the same source a veritable collection of volumes on the polite arts and crafts—“The Ready Letter-Writer”; “Manners Maketh Man”; “Seven Thousand Errors of Speech;” “Social Culture in the Smart Set,” and the like.