Just then Aunt Sarah came to the door and called them, and when she saw them she said, "Good gracious what on earth have you been doing?" and Tommy, that's the oldest boy, said,
"We've been playing we were pigs ma and it's real fun and wasn't Jimmy good to show us how?"
I think they had to boil the boys in hot water before they could get the mud off, and their clothes have all got to be sent to the poor people out West whose things were all lost in the great floods. If you'll believe it, I never got the least bit of thanks for showing the boys how to amuse themselves, but Aunt Sarah said that I'd get something when father came home, and she wasn't mistaken. I'd rather not mention what it was that I got, but I got it mostly on the legs, and I think bamboo canes ought not to be sold to fathers any more than poison.
I was going to tell why I should like to be an animal; but as it is getting late, I must close.
[A PLEASING EXPERIMENT.]
Every time I try to improve my mind with science I resolve that I will never do it again, and then I always go and do it. Science is so dreadfully tempting that you can hardly resist it. Mr. Travers says that if anybody once gets into the habit of being a scientific person there is little hope that he will ever reform, and he says he has known good men who became habitual astronomers, and actually took to prophesying weather, all because they yielded to the temptation to look through telescopes, and to make figures on the black-board with chalk.
I was reading a lovely book the other day. It was all about balloons and parachutes. A parachute is a thing that you fall out of a balloon with. It is something like an open umbrella, only nobody ever borrows it. If you hold a parachute over your head and drop out of a balloon, it will hold you up so that you will come down to the ground so gently that you won't be hurt the least bit.
I told Tom McGinnis about it, and we said we would make a parachute, and jump out of the second-story window with it. It is easy enough to make one, for all you have to do is to get a big umbrella and open it wide, and hold on to the handle. Last Saturday afternoon Tom came over to my house, and we got ready to try what the book said was "a pleasing scientific experiment."