A naughty person ... walketh with a forward mouth.
He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with his fingers;
... he deviseth mischief continually;...
Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without remedy.—Proverbs, vi. 12-15.
It was morning—the cool of the morning. The pigeons were gossiping under the barn eaves. In the apple-tree a robin's song thrilled at intervals, and the jays were chattering incessantly in the cherry-trees by the fence. The dew was still on the grass that lay in the parallelogram of shade made by the Sears' dwelling, and in the twilight of grass-land all the elf-people were whispering and tittering and scampering about in surreptitious revel. The breeze of dawn, tired and worn out, was sinking to a fitful doze in the cottonwood foliage near by. In the lattice of the kitchen porch two butterflies were chasing the sun flecks in and out among the branches of the climbing rose. Even the humble burdock weeds and sunflowers lining the path that led to the gate seemed to be exalted by the breath of the morning air, and not out of harmony with the fine, high chord of ecstasy that was stirring the soul of things. And yet in that hour, James Sears, with a green-checked gingham apron tied about his neck, stood near a rain-barrel, bobbing up and down on a churn-handle. His back ached, and his heart was full of bitterness at the scheme of creation. For it was Saturday morning—his by every law, precedent, or tradition known or reported in the Court of Boyville. But instead of inhaling the joys of the new day, James, whose Courtly name was "Jimmie," looked for yellow granules on the dasher, and promised God if He would let him grow up that his little boy should never have to churn.
Any boy knows that it is a degrading thing to churn, and he further knows that to wear a green-checked gingham apron is odious beyond description; however, if the disgusting thing is tied under a boy's arms, from whence it may be slipped down over the hips and the knees to the ground, by a certain familiar twist of the body, the case is not absolutely hopeless. But Jimmy Sears's apron strings were tied about his neck; so his despair was black and abysmal. Once in a while Jimmy's bosom became too heavily freighted, and he paused to sigh. He cheered himself up on these occasions by slyly licking the churn-dasher; but the good cheer on the dasher was a stimulant that left him more miserable than it found him. Ever and anon from some remote chamber in the house behind him came the faint, gasping cry of a day-old baby. That cry drowned the cooing of the doves, the song of the robin, and the chirping of the dwellers in the grass; to Jimmy the bleat of the little human lamb sounded like the roar of a lion. He could endure penal servitude on his Saturday, with a patience born of something approaching a philosophy; he could wear a checked gingham apron, even as a saint wears an unbecoming halo; but the arrival of the new baby—the fifth addition to the family in the short period of years covered by Jimmy Sears's memory—brought a bitter pill of wrath and dropped it in the youth's brimful cup of woe. As the minutes dragged wearily along, Jimmy Sears reviewed the story of his thraldom. He thought of how, in his short-dress days, he had been put to rocking a cradle; how in his kilted days, there had been ever a baby's calico dress to consider; how, from his earliest fishing-days, there had been always a tot tagging after him, throwing sticks and stones in the water to scare the fish; and how, now in his swimming and cave-dwelling days, there was a swarm of tow-headed Searses, a crawler, a creeper, a toddler, a stumbler, and a sneaker to run away from.
