end. I know you don't really mean what you say; but I
won't allow you to speak disrespectfully of my mother."

"Well, I won't," says Pat, "but _you're_ a muff, anyhow."

"Perhaps I am," replies Tom.

"Of course you are, because you're afraid to jump over that river, and
I'm not. So here goes."

Pat thereupon jumps the river (he is a splendid leaper), and Tom
hesitates.

"Come along, Tom; don't be a hen."

Tom gives way, alas! to a disobedient impulse, and dashing at the leap
comes to the edge, when he finds, somehow, that he has not got the
proper foot first for the spring--almost every boy knows the feeling I
allude to; his heart fails, and he balks.

"O Tom, what a nimini-pimini muff you are, to be sure!"

Tom, as I have said, is a bold boy. His blood boils at this; he rushes
wildly at the bank, hurls himself recklessly into the air, barely
reaches the opposite side with a scramble, and falls souse into the
river, from which he issues, as Pat says amid peals of laughter, "like a
half-drowned rat."

Now, had Tom been permitted to follow the bent of his own bold impulses,
he would have found out, years ago, how far and how high he could leap,
and how far exactly he could depend on his own courage in certain
circumstances; and he would either, on the one hand, have measured the
leap with an accustomed eye, and declined to take it with a
good-humoured admission that it was beyond his powers, or, on the other
hand, he would calmly have collected his well and oft tried energies for
the spring. The proper foot, from long experience, would have come to
the ground at the right time. His mind, freed from all anxiety as to
what he could accomplish, would have received a beneficial impulse from
his friend's taunt. No nervous dread of a ducking would have checked
the completeness of his bound, because he would have often been ducked
before, and would have discovered that in most cases, if the clothes be
changed at once, a ducking is not worth mentioning--from a hydropathic
point of view is, in fact, beneficial--and he would have cleared the
river with comfort to himself and confusion to his friend, and without a
ducking or the uneasiness of conscience caused by the knowledge that he
had disobeyed his mother. Had Peterkin not been trained to encounter
danger, his natural boldness alone would never have enabled him to stand
the charge of that buffalo bull.

There are muffs in this world. I do not refer to those h