"Did you ever hear of his dropping a job of mischief until he had thoroughly finished it?" asked the doctor.
"No," answered the builder with great promptness.
The final result was that sundry papers and moneys passed between the doctor and the builder, and on the following Monday morning, Jack was at work at seven o'clock nailing planking upon a barn. The news got about town very rapidly, and by noon there were at least twenty boys looking at the unexpected spectacle, and tormenting Jack with ironical questions. When night came Jack's hand felt as if it could never grasp a hammer again, and he was otherwise so weary that he declined, without thanks, an invitation to go with the other boys to serenade a newly-married couple with horns and bells. Then he helped shingle a portion of the roof of the new barn, but his mind was greatly distracted by the awkwardness of a boy, in an adjoining pasture, who was trying to braid together the tips of the tails of two calves; the consequence was that he had progressed so short a distance with his own row of shingles that the other workmen had gone across the barn and returned to start afresh, and, as they rested until Jack got out of the way, they ungratefully upbraided him because of his slowness, and he wasn't going to be called slow again, not for all the calves' tails in the universe.
This book might have been continued indefinitely, had it not been that Jack was steadily at work which he liked, and had a great deal of his father's society out of working hours. Gaining these, he lost his reputation for being the worst boy in town, for although he remained for several years a boy and a very lively one, he had something besides mischief to exercise his busy brain upon, and a boy cannot be honestly busy and mischievous also, any more than he can eat his cake and have it too. Even the doctor and Mrs. Wittingham reformed, though it was very hard for the latter to stop fretting at the boy, and for the former to cease acting as if his son, like his horse, merely needed food, rest and correction.
Jack did not go about preaching reform to the boys and advising them all to be carpenters, but he unconsciously talked from a standpoint very different from that which he had habitually occupied in other days, and his talk came gradually to exert considerable influence among the boys, though they seldom noticed the change themselves. Jack's very title, "The Worst Boy in Town," was in considerable danger of lapsing for lack of a successor, and the inhabitants of Doveton are still undecided as to where it belongs.
As for the doctor's great work on heredity, it is not in print yet, for the doctor happened one day, while mourning over a neglected and consequently unproductive Bartlett pear tree, to drift into some analogies between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, with the result that he realized that if the splendid hereditary tendencies of the tree could not prevent its bareness and its running to superfluous wood, there could be no hope of an untrained boy, even if he was a scion of the Wittingham stock. This idea took such entire possession of the doctor that he went into the house and burned his manuscript as far as completed, and all the notes beside.
According to Jack, who professes to be an infallible authority on the subject, nice little Mattie Barker grows nicer every day, and she has promised to change her name in the course of time, and her parents have endorsed her decision, for though Jack is not yet of age, steady boys who are also bright, and have learned a business which is not akin either to gambling or theft, are not numerous enough to be despised. And Jack has a whole portfolio full of cottage plans, all of his own designing, over which he and Mattie spend long and industrious evenings, and Jack has taken a solemn vow that when the proper plan is decided upon, and the building begins, Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel shall be the sole hod-carrier, and shall be paid the highest market rates for his services.
Being practically a successful man, Jack is the receptacle for the confidences of hosts of his old playmates, who feel that their good qualities are not appreciated by a world which is quick to complain of their occasional irregularities, but he has sent many of these youths sadly away by remarking:
"It doesn't matter how many good qualities are inside of a fellow, if only his bad ones make themselves lively on the surface."