Daniel was a snuffler. Whenever I had a companion in the schoolhouse at the noon recess, it was generally this lad, and when he was there he was nursing a wound and snuffling. If there was any trouble to be got into, if there was a flying ball to come in contact with, ice to break through or a limb to snap, Daniel never failed to be on hand. Then he would burst rudely into my solitude and while I sopped cold water over his injured members, he would blubber. When I turned from him to my own corner by the window, the blubber would die away into a snuffle, and there he would sit, his head buried in his hands, snuffling and snuffling until books.
Now I spoke sharply to the boy. He raised his head and fixed one red eye on me, for the other was hidden by his hand.
"I guesst you was never hit on the eye by a ball, was ye?" he stuttered.
"I guess I have been," was my reply. "I was a good round-town player, and you never saw me crying like that, either."
"I was playin' sock-ball," snuffled the boy, and a solitary tear rolled down his snub nose. He flicked it away with his right hand, and this act disclosed to me a great bluish swelling, from under which a bit of eye was twinkling mournfully at me. The boy was hurt; my heart went out to him, for the memory of my own sock-ball and tickley-bender days came back to me.
"Come, come," I said more kindly, laying a hand on the black head. "Brace up, Daniel, for I must call the others in, and you don't want them to see you crying. Dare to be like the great Daniel, who wasn't even afraid of the wild beasts."
"But Dan'el in the Lion's Den never played sock-ball," whimpered the boy, covering each eye with a chubby fist as he rubbed away the traces of his tears.
Beware, Daniel Arker! Form not in my mind such a picture as that of the mighty prophet in his robes being "it." Over the mantel in our parlor we have a picture of the lion's den, and it is one of the choicest of our family treasures. Whence it came, we do not know. Even my mother, familiar as she was with the minutest detail of our family history as far back as my grandfather's time, could not tell me that; but we always believed it to be one of the world's great pictures that by some strange chance had come into our possession. How well I remember my keen disappointment on learning that it was not a photograph. It took years to convince Tim of that, and we consoled ourselves that at least it had been drawn by one who was there. Else how could he have done it so accurately? For the likeness of Daniel was splendid. The great prophet of Babylon must have looked just like that. He must have sat on a boulder in the middle of the rocky chamber, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, one hand resting languidly on the head of a mighty lion, a sandalled foot using another hoary mane as a footstool. There were lions all around him, and how they loved him! You could see it in their eyes. Tip Pulsifer once told me that Daniel had them charmed, and that he was looking so intently at the ceiling because he was repeating over and over again the mystic words—probably Dutch—that his grandfather had taught him. One slip—and I should see the fiery flash return to the eyes of the beasts! One slip—and they would be upon him! To Tip I replied that this was preposterous, as Babylon lived before there was any Dutch, and there being no Dutch, how could there be effective charms? Daniel was saved by a miracle. But Tip is slow-witted. Charms were originally called miracles, he said. The miracle was the father of the charm. Folks would say there were no charms to-day, yet they would believe in charms that were worked a few thousand years ago, only they called them miracles. It was useless to argue with a thick fellow like Tip. I had always preferred to think of Daniel stilling the wild beasts by the grandeur of his soul, and the suggestion that I drag him from his throne, king of men and king of beasts, and picture him playing sock-ball, doing a double shuffle with his sandalled feet, tossing his long robe wildly about, now leaping, now dodging, to avoid the flying sphere—it was too much. It angered me.
"You should be ashamed of yourself, Daniel Arker!" I cried. "The idea of a boy that comes of good church folks like yours talking that way about one of the prophets! I'll dally with you no more. The boys shall see you as you are. It's books!"
I threw the window open and shouted, "Books!" I pounded on the ledge with my ruler and shouted, "Books!"