Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

"Oh, do, Thesis," I said, after supper. "Let him have his way."

"And that's where you'll drop your candy," said Little Sister in her serio-quaint way.

Thesis, who is so good that she says only what she thinks and is so honest that she never suspects others of diplomatic pretenses, took me at my word. Captain Skipper should sleep with his dear Uncle Jack that night!

You who read this, did you ever sleep with a boy? I don't mean one of those good boys that you read of in Sunday-school books—the impossible kind—who lives like a saint every day and says his prayers and retires like a gentleman at night: but one of those lusty, growing young devils, born with a spring in his back, who howls out the first year, sleeps out the second, and by the time of the third is ready to chase the cat around and fight brave battles with the hen folks. At four he is ready for the birds' nests and tin cans for the dogs' tails, and a little later he breaks every colt that tries to keep the Sabbath in the meadow by the still waters.

When night comes—ay, there is the rub! He howls away the twilight hours and spends the night kicking, coughing, rolling out of bed or having fits, and yet sleeping through it all like a cub in winter quarters.

The weather that night was warm, one of those hot April nights that lies humid and close. "The dear little fellow will be so proud to sleep with his Uncle Jack," said his fond mother, when she kissed him good night; "and he does sleep so sound and quietly."

Never having owned a boy, I believed all of this. Did you ever try to undress a lad of four that had chased the cat around until he was hot? His clothes stick to him like a plaster. Being a novice, I got everything unbuttoned and then skinned him, peeled them off. To my surprise—and I found later that there were all kinds of surprises in that boy—in fact, that he was made out of surprises—he insisted upon saying his prayers! But I never saw anything go more promptly to sleep at his devotions. I had to derrick him up into the bed.

One of the strange things about a boy is that when he starts to wiggle around over the bed in his sleep he does it diagonally. I pulled him back on his own side of the bed five times within the next hour. Then I would hear him scuffling and flopping about, always ending in a long-drawn, dismal and dreary sigh, that would have made his fortune as Romeo. It always ended in his rounding up against the footboard in the opposite corner, flat on his back, each limb and arm pointing to its own cardinal point of the compass, his nightgown rolled up in a wad under his neck, and his body looking like that of a young bull frog in a Kentucky horse-pond.

If there is anything more absurd than a boy in this attitude I have never seen it. I tried to awaken him and get him back, but he only sighed one of those long sighs, unlimbered and slept on. I went back to my window and began to work on my bill, but my thoughts were soon dispelled with a start. I heard a choking, gasping, frightfully suffocating sound, mingled with a dolorous wheezing: "O-woo,—oo—oo—wow—O-woo—oo!"

I was at his side in an instant, this time frightened. He was sitting stolidly up in bed, a strange gaze in his wide-open eyes, his face beaded with a clammy moisture, his face drawn in a spasm. I had seen a boy have a fit before and I went upstairs after his mother, two jumps at a time.