y be by
some people accounted a great sin in me; but I deny it, for I did it as
a duty, and what a man or boy does for the right will never be put into
the sum of his transgressions.

This boy, whose name was M'Gill, was, at all his leisure hours, engaged
in drawing profane pictures of beasts, men, women, houses, and trees,
and, in short, of all things that his eye encountered. These profane
things the master often smiled at, and admired; therefore I began
privately to try my hand likewise. I had scarcely tried above once to
draw the figure of a man, ere I conceived that I had hit the very
features of Mr. Wilson. They were so particular that they could not be
easily mistaken, and I was so tickled and pleased with the droll
likeness that I had drawn that I laughed immoderately at it. I tried no
other figure but this; and I tried it in every situation in which a man
and a schoolmaster could be placed. I often wrought for hours together
at this likeness, nor was it long before I made myself so much master
of the outline that I could have drawn it in any situation whatever,
almost off hand. I then took M'Gill's account book of algebra home with
me, and at my leisure put down a number of gross caricatures of Mr.
Wilson here and there, several of them in situations notoriously
ludicrous. I waited the discovery of this treasure with great
impatience; but the book, chancing to be one that M'Gill was not using,
I saw it might be long enough before I enjoyed the consummation of my
grand scheme: therefore, with all the ingenuity I was master of, I
brought it before our dominie's eye. But never shall I forget the rage
that gleamed in the tyrant's phiz! I was actually terrified to look at
him, and trembled at his voice. M'Gill was called upon, and examined
relating to the obnoxious figures. He denied flatly that any of them
were of his doing. But the master inquiring at him whose they were, he
could not tell, but affirmed it to be some trick. Mr. Wilson at one
time began, as I thought, to hesitate; but the evidence was so strong
against M'Gill that at length his solemn asseverations of innocence
only proved an aggravation of his crime. There was not one in the
school who had ever been known to draw a figure but himself, and on him
fell the whole weight of the tyrant's vengeance. It was dreadful; and I
was once in hopes that he would not leave life in the culprit. He,
however, left the school for several months, refusing to return to