"Then I'll have none of it," said she, and opening the stove, was about to cast in a handful of the coins, when she hesitated.
"After all," said she, "'tisn't the money that's done wrong; why should I punish it?"
So she put it back into the teapot, and adopted a less expensive though more painful method of teaching her son to respect the Sabbath.
In the bitterness of the moment, Patsy firmly resolved that when he was a millionnaire—as he expected to be some day—he wouldn't give his mother a single dime. He afterward so far relented, however, as to admit to himself that he might let her have twenty thousand dollars, rather than see her suffer, but not a cent more.
CHAPTER XVIII.
AN EXTRA FOURTH-OF-JULY.
Deacon Graham had predicted that "the wind would go down with the sun," and then the kite would fall. But the prediction was not fulfilled: at least there seemed to be a steady breeze up where the kite was, and in the moon-lighted evening it swayed gently to and fro, tugging at its string, and gracefully waving its pendulous tail. All the young people in town appeared to be walking out to see it, and the evening services were very slimly attended.
Monday morning the trustees of the church began to take vigorous measures for the suppression of the mysterious kite.
The cart of Hook-and-Ladder No. 1 was wheeled up in front of the church, and the two longest ladders taken off, spliced together, and raised with great labor. But they fell far short of reaching any point from which the hoop that held the kite could be touched.