"What do you mean, Jack?" said the lady.
"Why, we play marbles for buttons sometimes, and there's only two or three boys in town that can beat me, and I never play with them."
"Where do they get the buttons to bet?" asked Mrs. Wittingham, "and," she continued, a dire suspicion coming suddenly to mind, "where do you get them?"
"I—I don't know," said Jack feebly, at which answer his mother sniffed alarmingly, and left Jack to feel that grown folks were most shamefully suspicious, and that they couldn't appreciate gratitude when it was offered them.
Two or three days later the fever set in, and Jack dreamed for days of Polar explorations, where he could go swimming in cooling seas and sun himself dry on iridescent icebergs. He planned a wonderful voyage of discovery to the North Pole, and it was of inestimable comfort to him to report progress to Matt, in the five minutes which that youth was allowed daily at the sufferer's bedside. The tenor of his thoughts was daily interrupted by his mother, who considered the occasion demanded Bible reading instead of personal sympathy for the youth, who could not leave his bed to attend family prayers, and she so frequently selected passages descriptive of a locality the temperature of which is the reverse of polar, that Jack had to do a great deal of mental rambling to get his thoughts in proper trim again.
At last the fever subsided leaving Jack extremely weak in body, but of a temper simply angelic. He prefaced every request with "please," he never forgot to say "thank you," and he sang little hymns softly to himself. Mrs. Wittingham was delighted beyond measure, and when she suggested that the minister might like to call, and Jack replied that it would be very nice to have a chat with that gentleman, the lady became considerably alarmed on the subject of the boy's recovery. Mr. Daybright, the minister, was really a very pleasant man, as Jack discovered, now that he had time to "take his measure," as he himself expressed it, and after Mr. Daybright had talked with him for half an hour, and prayed with him, and departed, Jack did not know but he might finally conclude to be a minister himself, and have cake and cider offered him in the middle of the afternoon when he called upon boys with broken arms.
Then Jack's Sunday-school teacher called, and suggested that the class should come in a body, on the following Sunday, and Jack accepted the suggestion with fervor, and the class came, and stood decorously in a row, and sang several hymns, and looked as sober as if fish-lines and peg-tops and balls and birds' nests and orchards and crooked pins and truancy did not exist anywhere nearer than the planet Neptune. Then the teacher gave Jack a book from the Sunday-school library, which book he had selected with Jack's particular condition of mind in view, and although it proved to be the story of a dreadfully priggish but very pious little London footman, whose nature, tastes, temptations and general environment were utterly unlike Jack's, the boy labored manfully through it, and endeavored to persuade himself that he enjoyed it.
In fact, so thorough an overhauling did Jack's conscience receive that he even felt himself called upon to confess to the doctor his affair with Hoccamine's whiskey, but although the doctor had heard the story a month before from the lips of Matt's father, he had not yet reached that mental balance which would enable him to reprove the boy and still leave him impressed with a sense of the vileness of the rum traffic, so the doctor said only "Well," in a very grave way, and made an excuse to leave the sick chamber.
A few days later Jack was allowed to sit under the great trees in front of the house, and as he was positively forbidden to leave the grounds, to run, or to make any exertion which might disturb the arm, which he carried in a sling, he fell to noting the habits of birds with their young, until he became so affected that he silently vowed never to rob a nest again. He found in the flowers and the shrubbery many a charm which he had never suspected when weeding them; he contemplated cloud pictures until an overwhelming sense of the beautiful compelled him to decide upon an artistic career, and he watched every motion of whatever laborer happened to be in sight until he determined that he never again would throw a chip or anything else at a laboring man, no matter how funny he might look or how fluently he could swear when he espied his tormentor.
Finally, to the delight of his parents and many other people who were responsible for boys, but to the general depression of the boys themselves, it became known that Jack had signified his intention of joining the church. Mr. Daybright admitted that in years Jack was rather young to take such a step, but, on the other hand, he had a far abler mind, and—even although he was called the worst boy in town—a cleaner record than half the adults who came into the fold. Mr. Daybright had explained to him, as men often will to boys other than their own, that boys need not stop being boys and being happy just because they become good, so there was considerable disappointment experienced by such youths as shrewdly imagined that Jack's change of heart would result in his large and varied assortment of knives, lines, marbles, skates, etc., being thrown upon the market at reduced prices. Jack explained, with considerable vigor, that because he was going to give up mischief it did not necessarily follow that he should become a muff, or a soft head, or a twiddler, or an apron string, or a foo-foo, or a stick-in-the-mud, or a dummy, or any other of a dozen or two unpopular varieties of boy which he mentioned, but that he proposed to "keep his shirt on," remain "forked end down," retain possession of his eye-teeth, and have as good a time as anybody else could who didn't have to suffer for it afterward. And the unregenerate boys went away slowly and without the great possessions which they had expected to carry with them, while one of them who was generous as well as shrewd was heard to say that bully old Jack Wittingham wasn't going to flunk out after all, and that a fellow could do many a worse thing than to join the church.