“How often, in after life, have I applied the moral of this incident! How much moving eloquence and dire denunciation have I passed by with the remark:
“ ‘That is a great affair, no doubt, but it won’t stop a coffee-mill.’ ”
VI.
HOW SIMON SUGGS “RAISED JACK.”
Until Simon entered his seventeenth year, he lived with his father, an old “hard-shell” Baptist preacher; who, though very pious and remarkably austere, was very avaricious. The old man reared his boys—or endeavoured to do so—according to the strictest requisition of the moral law. But he lived, at the time to which we refer, in Middle Georgia, which was then newly settled; and Simon, whose wits from the time he was a “shirt-tail boy,” were always too sharp for his father’s, contrived to contract all the coarse vices incident to such a region.
He stole his mother’s roosters to fight them at Bob Smith’s grocery, and his father’s plough-horses to enter them in “quarter” matches at the same place. He pitched dollars with Bob Smith himself, and could “beat him into doll-rags” whenever it came to a measurement. To crown his accomplishments, Simon was tip-top at the game of “old sledge,” which was the fashionable game of that era, and was early initiated in the mystery of “stocking the papers.”
The vicious habits of Simon were, of course, a sore trouble to his father, Elder Jedediah. He reasoned, he counselled, he remonstrated, he lashed, but Simon was an incorrigible, irreclaimable devil.
One day the simple-minded old man came rather unexpectedly to the field where he had left Simon and Ben, and a negro boy named Bill, at work. Ben was still following his plough, but Simon and Bill were in a fence-corner very earnestly engaged at “seven up.” Of course the game was instantly suspended, as soon as they spied the old man sixty or seventy yards off, striding towards them.
It was evidently a “gone case” with Simon and Bill; but our hero determined to make the best of it. Putting the cards into one pocket, he coolly picked up the small coins which constituted the stake, and fobbed them in the other, remarking:
“Well, Bill, this game’s blocked; we’d as well quit.”
“But, Massa Simon,” remarked the boy, “half dat money’s mine. An’t you gwine to lemme hab ’em?”