“Don’t bother!” was the impatient reply, and the brow of St. Sebastian Sockdolager grew black as his own ink.
“The boys, sir, the boys!—am I to be worried out of my life and soul?”
The right hand of St. Sebastian Sockdolager fell heavily upon the huge pewter inkstand—the concatenation of his ideas had been broken—he half raised himself from his chair and glanced significantly from his visitor to the door. “Mizzle!” said he, in a hoarse, suppressed whisper.
The language itself was unintelligible—the word might have been Chaldaic, for all that Sapid knew to the contrary; but there are situations in which an interpreter is not needed, and this appeared to be one of them. Sapid never before made a movement so swiftly extemporaneous.
He intends shortly to try whether the Grand Jury is a convert to the new doctrine of sauciness.
Joseph C. Neal.
THE BOYS AROUND THE HOUSE.
SURELY you must have seen a boy of eight or ten years of age get ready for bed? His shoe-strings are in a hard knot, and after a few vain efforts to unlace them he rushes after a case-knife and saws each string in two. One shoe is thrown under the table, the other behind the stove, his jacket behind the door, and his stockings are distributed over as many chairs as they will reach.
The boy doesn’t slip his pants off; he struggles out of them, holding a leg down with his foot and drawing his limbs out after many stupendous efforts. While doing this his hands are clutched into the bedclothes, and by the time he is ready to get into bed the quilts and sheets are awry and the bed is full of humps and lumps. His brother has gone through the same motions, and both finally crawl into bed. They are good boys, and they love each other, but they are hardly settled on their backs when one cries out—