free to withdraw
at its first uneasy wriggle.

Of this shackled spirit of kindness, always striving within the old man,
the little boy had come to be entirely conscious. So real was it to him,
so dependable, that he never suspected that a certain little blow with the
open hand one day was meant to punish him for conduct he had persisted in
after three emphatic admonitions.

"Oh! that _hurts_!" he had cried, looking up at the confused old man with
unimpaired faith in his having meant not more than a piece of friendly
roughness. This look of flawless confidence in the uprightness of his
purpose, the fine determination to save him chagrin by smiling even though
the hurt place tingled, left in the old man's mind a biting conviction
that he had been actually on the point of behaving as one gentleman may
not behave to another. Quick was he to make the encounter accord with the
child's happy view, even picking him up and forcing from himself the
gaiety to rally him upon his babyish tenderness to rough play. Not less
did he hold it true that "The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child
left to himself bringeth his mother to shame--" and with the older boy
he was not unconscientious in this matter. For Allan took punishment as
any boy would, and, indeed, was so careful that he seldom deserved it. But
the old man never ceased to be grateful that the littler boy had laughed
under that one blow, unable to suspect that it could have been meant in
earnest.

From the first day that the little boy felt the tender cool grass under
his bare toes that summer, life became like perfectly played music. This
was after the long vacation began, when there was no longer any need to
remember to let his voice fall after a period, or to dread his lessons so
that he must learn them more quickly than any other pupil in school. There
would be no more of that wretched fooling until fall, a point of time
inconceivably far away. Before it arrived any one of a number of strange
things might happen to avert the calamity of education. For instance, he
might be born again, a thing of which he had lately heard talk; a
contingency by no means flawless in prospect, since it probably meant
having the mumps again, and things like that. But if it came on the very
last day of vacation, or on the first morning of school, just as he was
called on to recite, snatching him from the very jaws of the Moloch, and
if it fixed him so he need not be afraid in the night o