“Oh, that’s perfectly lovely!” she panted, “and it’s more than enough! But oh, Johnny,” she added, in a changed tone, “if we should ever write poems and stories and things, after we’re grown up, do you believe that some dreadful editor will let his children make kites out of them?”
“I’m afraid he will, of mine,” said Johnny, frankly, “for that’s about all they’d be good for, but you write much better compositions than I do, Tiny, for all you’re so much younger than I am, so perhaps the editors will print yours. But it does seem a sort of shame, when you think of all the time it must take them to do it, and how flat they must feel when it turns out to have been for nothing. Now this one”—looking at it critically—“is really beautifully written, and on such good paper. Why, even the paper must cost them ever so much! I say, Tiny, it’s just as if we had to put on five dollar gold pieces, or gold dollars, for bait when we go fishing, and then had them nibbled off without catching anything. I’ll tell that to papa—I think he might make a story, or a poem, or a fable, or something out of it—don’t you?”
“Yes, it’s just the kind of thing they use for a fable,” said Tiny, approvingly, and so, in steady work at the kite, enlivened by such intellectual conversations as this, the day flew by, and by evening the Monster was finished, tail and all.
There had been more than enough of the strong white paper for everything, and Tiny had carefully cut the “bobs” out of it, fringing each one at both ends. The colored paper for the enterprise had been on hand for some time, and Mrs. Leslie put the crowning glory on, by drawing a monogram to take the place of the separate initials of Bob’s name, which were to have adorned one side of the kite. This monogram was cut by Tiny’s deft fingers from pink and blue paper, and carefully pasted together in the middle of one side.
Johnny had so entirely succeeded in silencing his scruples about the manuscript, that he would probably never have thought of it again, if it had not been rather forcibly recalled to his memory. It had not occurred to Tiny to ask any questions about it; such streaks of luck had come to them before, and she had perfect faith in Johnny. So when, at the dinner-table, on Monday, Mr. Leslie said to his wife,—
“I’ve somehow mislaid a very bright article by Mrs. —— which I meant to use in the next number. Did you empty the waste basket, dear, or did the children?”
Before his mother could answer, Johnny, with a very red face, and a lump in his throat, had told the whole story.
Mr. Leslie looked exceedingly grave.
“I am very much annoyed by the loss of this manuscript,” he said, “for even should Mrs. —— have a rough draft of it, she will be obliged to take the trouble of making a second copy, and should she not, it will be necessary for me to pay her for it, as if I had used it. But that is not the worst of it, Johnny. If we deliberately stifle our consciences, after a while, we cease to hear from them. Do you remember asking me what ‘Quench not the Spirit’ means?”