And when he got over his mortification a little he resolved to investigate for himself. So he went out in the kitchen and built up a fire in the stove, took off all the griddles, and piled on the wood as nigh as Abraham did as he could in a cook stove, accordin’ to a picter the Born Baptist had shown him. He got a good hot fire goin’, and then he took a book, a costly book that Hamen had gin to Jack, thinkin’ that though it wuz pretty old for him now, he would grow up to it. It wuz full of costly engravin’s, and wuz the thing that Jack loved best of all his possessions.
So he laid that book on the hot griddles, and then knelt down and prayed for God not to burn it up. He lifted his voice loud in prayer. Tamer Ann, who heard him, thought that he wuz preachin’, as he often did.
So she didn’t interfere, and she wuz at that very minute mistrustin’ she had got a new distemper. She had bumped her knee gittin’ down to look under the bed after a dime novel, “The Wild Princess of the Enchanted Forest,” and wuz some in hopes that she had got the sinevetus. But pretty soon she smelt a smudge, and she run out and there wuz the valuable book all burnt and shriveled up, and poor little Jack kneelin’ there with the tears runnin’ down his cheeks in copious astorents and he a moanin’ to himself, and groanin’ out:
“Oh, the Lord might a done it if He had wanted to!” and “Oh, the lamb didn’t come!” and “Oh, He didn’t save my book!” And so on and so on.
Well, Tamer Ann didn’t take the poor little mourner and seeker after truth to her heart and wipe away his tears and tell him all about it, all she could tell, all any of us can tell, which is little enough, Heaven knows. No, she jest whipped him severely. And when he tried to tell her what he did it for, how the teacher had told him that it wuz so, she told him to stop instantly and to not say another word to her about it, but to go to bed without his supper for his naughtiness. And poor little Jack had to meach off to bed and lay there with his little mind workin’ on and workin’ on, his hungry stomach makin’ his brain all the more active.
Tamer Ann might whip his tongue still, but she couldn’t stop his mind from workin’. No, the one that set that machinery to goin’ wuz the only one who could stop it. As he had told his Ma once, “You can make me keep my tongue still, but you can’t stop my thinker.” No, Tamer Ann couldn’t whip that still.
Well, the poor little creeter lay and pondered over what could have caused the failure of his plans. And he finally made up his mind that his sacrifice wuzn’t costly enough.
He loved the book the best of anything he owned, but the B. B. had told him that he must offer up what he loved best of anything in the world. And he remembered, too, in the story of Abraham it wuz a livin’ sacrifice. Why hadn’t he thought of it? Why, it must be his mother, of course. For, by that mystery of love born in the deep silence and perils of maternity, Jack loved his mother the best of all, and Tamer loved him (in her way).
Well, from that time Tamer Ann wuz doomed in Jack’s eyes, set apart as a costly oblation to be offered up on the altar of sacrifice, and he begun to watch her so mysterious like, and kinder prowl round her in such a strange way that they all noticed it. He went to Sabbath school agin in the meantime, and wuz agin fed on the sound, hard food that would almost have cracked the teeth of a adult, but which poor little Jack wuz expected to chew on and digest (poor little creeter!)