The brilliant chaps who ride hobbies of their own—
“Not a damn cent!” was the reply, as the great editor went on writing. “Not enough of them go there now. I could name hundreds who ought to have been there long ago——” all this in a whining drawl that carried conviction with it.
Speaking of drawls, I wish all my readers could have heard Mark Twain’s voice as he told me a tale of juvenile woe. I had asked him if he could remember the first money he had ever earned.
“Yes,” he said. “It was at school. All boys had the habit of going to school in those days, and they hadn’t any more respect for the desks than they had for the teachers. There was a rule in our school that any boy marring his desk, either with pencil or knife, would be chastised publicly before the whole school or pay a fine of five dollars. Besides the rule there was a ruler; I knew it because I had felt it; it was a darned hard one, too.
“One day I had to tell my father that I had broken the rule, and had to pay a fine or take a public whipping, and he said:
“‘Sam, it would be too bad to have the name of Clemens disgraced before the whole school, so I’ll pay the fine. But I don’t want you to lose anything, so come up-stairs.’ I went up-stairs with father and he was for-giving me. I came down-stairs with the feeling in one hand and the five dollars in the other, and decided that as I’d been punished once, and got used to it, I wouldn’t mind taking the other licking at school. So I did, and I kept the five dollars. That was the first money I ever earned.”
This unexpected shift of the moral point of view is peculiar to boys. James Whitcomb Riley, author of no end of things, humorous and pathetic, told me of a small boy who astonished his mother one night by saying his prayers in German. When reproved, he said:
“Oh, that was a joke.”
“You must not joke with heaven,” said his mother severely.