“Of course I will, you loveliest woman alive!” said Johnny, rapturously, “and I shall try not to have my rights treading on anybody else’s rights’ toes!” with which extraordinary declaration, he pranced off to the barn, closely followed by Tiny and Veronica.
There was to be a picnic on the Fourth-of-July. Mr. and Mrs. Leslie and three or four neighbor families had agreed to take their dinners in baskets and butter-kettles, to a very pretty grove which grew obligingly near to the little village-city where they lived, and where Mr. Leslie edited the one newspaper of the place, which fact enabled him to have the Declaration conveniently printed for Johnny, who had been chosen by the boys for the orator of the day, because he stood highest in his reading and declamation classes. It wanted three or four days, yet, of the “glorious Fourth,” and Johnny was diligently practising his voice, for he was afraid, notwithstanding his mother’s earnest assurances to the contrary, that it was not loud enough for an open air oration!
Johnny was a very sociable and friendly little boy, and he had recently made acquaintance with a boy somewhat older than himself, whose profession was bootblacking. This boy had a cool, knowing, and business-like air, which had greatly taken Johnny’s fancy, and it occurred to him that a partnership with Jim Brady might be a very good thing. Jim had happened to mention that he owned a wheelbarrow, and Johnny owned an apple tree, which had been planted by his father on the day of Johnny’s birth, and which, this season, was full of promising apples. So Johnny resolved, if Jim improved on acquaintance, and showed symptoms of honor and honesty, to propose to him, when the apples should be ripe, to take his wheelbarrow and peddle them “on shares.”
He would probably have made Jim the offer on the second day of their acquaintance, but his mother advised him to wait a little. She felt sure that Johnny would tell her at once, if Jim should use bad language, or say or do anything which would make him a dangerous acquaintance for her boy, and she thought it would be time enough then to break off the intercourse which might put a little pleasure into the hard life of the bootblack, whose sturdy figure and face she had often noticed in passing his stand, and she had also noticed that he was almost always busy, even when other boys of his trade were idle.
Johnny was such a very small boy that it had never entered his mother’s head to forbid him to smoke. She thought of it once in a while, and hoped that when the time came for him to choose about it, he would elect to go without a habit which is certainly useless, and which in many cases involves a great deal of selfishness. She wished Johnny’s wife, if he should be so fortunate as to have a good wife some day in the far future, to love him altogether, not with a “putting-up” with one thing, and “making allowances” for another; and she meant, when the time came, to lay the whole subject plainly before him, and let him choose rationally for himself. It was quite true that his father smoked; but he smoked very moderately, never where it could annoy any one, and, whenever he bought cigars, he deposited a sum equal to that spent for them, in the little earthern jug with which he presented his wife once a year, and this money was neither “house money” nor “pin money”; it was for Mrs. Leslie to spend absolutely as she liked. And Johnny’s mother meant him, if he should smoke at all, to be just such a smoker as his father was.
