t makes him appreciate the little
things and fight for the big ones. But it makes the fellow with the
retreating forehead do the thing that looks right, instead of the thing
that is right; it makes him fear a laugh and shrivel up at a sneer; it
makes him live to-day on to-morrow's salary; it makes him a cheap
imitation of some Willie who has a little more money than he has,
without giving him zip enough to go out and force luck for himself.

I never see one of these fellows swelling around with their petty
larceny pride that I don't think of a little experience of mine when I
was a boy. An old fellow caught me lifting a watermelon in his patch,
one afternoon, and instead of cuffing me and letting me go, as I had
expected if I got caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and told
her what I had been up to.

Your grandma had been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she had
never heard of these new-fangled theories of reasoning gently with a
child till its under lip begins to stick out and its eyes to fill with
tears as it sees the error of its ways. She fetched the tears all right,
but she did it with a trunk strap or a slipper. And your grandma was a
pretty substantial woman. Nothing of the tootsey-wootsey about her foot,
and nothing of the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she was
through I knew that I'd been licked--polished right off to a point--and
then she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my nose out of it
till I could recite the Ten Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson by
heart.

There was a whole chapter of it, and an Old Testament chapter at that,
but I laid right into it because I knew ma, and supper was only two
hours off. I can repeat that chapter still, forward and backward,
without missing a word or stopping to catch my breath.

Every now and then old Doc Hoover used to come into the Sunday-school
room and scare the scholars into fits by going around from class to
class and asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first time, I was
glad to see him happen in, and I didn't try to escape attention when he
worked around to our class. For ten minutes I'd been busting for him to
ask me to recite a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply cut
loose and recited the whole chapter and threw in the Ten Commandments
for good measure. It sort of dazed the Doc, because he had come to me
for information about the Old Testament before, and we'd never got much
beyond, And Ahab begat