After I had him two days I heard mother say, "Seems to me I hear very queer noises every now and then up stairs." I knew what the matter was, but I never said anything, and I felt so happy when I thought what a good boy I was to raise a pig for my dear father.
Bridget went up to my room about eight o'clock one evening, just before I was going to bed, to take up my clean clothes. We were all sitting in the dining-room, when we heard her holler as if she was being murdered. We all ran out to see what was the matter, and were half way up the stairs, when the pig came down, and upset the whole family, and piled them up on the top of himself at the foot of the stairs, and before we got up Bridget came down and fell over us, and said she had just opened the young masther's thrunk and out jumps the ould Satan himself and she must see the priest or she would be a dead woman.
You wouldn't believe that, though I told them that I was raising the pig to sell it and give the money to father; they all said that they had never heard of such an abandoned and peremptory boy, and father said, "Come up stairs with me and I'll see if I can't teach you that this house isn't a pig-pen." I don't know what became of the pig, for he broke the parlor window and ran away, and nobody ever heard of him again.
"I'd like to see that boy James. I don't care how big he is. I'd show him that he can't go on setting good examples to innocent boys without suffering as he deserves to suffer."
[MY MOTHER'S DÉBUT.]
BY B. A. N.
"Tell you a story?" said dear old grandma. "Dear me! dear me! I think I've told you all I know. Shall I tell you 'Cinderella' over again? or—"
"No, no, grandma," says a chorus of voices; "tell us something about when you were young."
"Well, if you wish, I'll tell you about my mother's first party. It was a winter night, and mother was to go at eight, and that was considered very late; but Uncle Robert, who was to take her, couldn't get home before. Her dress was beautiful—a peach-colored satin, with lace on it already a generation old, and the hair-dresser was to come out from town to arrange her hair, and she was to take with her Abigail, our poor half-witted maid, to put on the finishing touches after they arrived.