lp you," she added
sweetly.

William drew a deep breath. "All right, I will," he said.

She heaved a sigh of relief.

"You'll begin _now_, won't you?" she said earnestly.

William considered. There were several things that he had wanted to do
for some time, but hadn't managed to do yet. He had not tried turning
off the water at the main, and hiding the key and seeing what would
happen; he hadn't tried shutting up the cat in the hen-house; he
hadn't tried painting his long-suffering mongrel Jumble with the pot
of green paint that was in the tool shed; he hadn't tried pouring
water into the receiver of the telephone; he hadn't tried locking the
cook into the larder. There were, in short, whole fields of crime
entirely unexplored. All these things--and others--must be done
before the reformation.

"I can't begin _jus'_ yet," said William. "Say day after to-morrow."

She considered this for a minute.

"Very well," she said at last reluctantly, "day after to-morrow."

* * * * *

The next day dawned bright and fair. William arose with a distinct
sense that something important had happened. Then he thought of the
reformation. He saw himself leading a quiet and blameless life,
walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing
his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite
to his family, his instructors, and the various foolish people who
visited his home for the sole purpose (apparently) of making inane
remarks to him. He saw all this, and the picture was far from
unattractive--in the distance. In the immediate future, however, there
were various quite important things to be done. There was a whole
normal lifetime of crime to be crowded into one day. Looking out of
his window he espied the gardener bending over one of the beds. The
gardener had a perfectly bald head. William had sometimes idly
imagined the impact of a pea sent violently from a pea-shooter with
the gardener's bald head. Before there had been a lifetime of
experiment before him, and he had put off this one idly in favour of
something more pressing. Now there was only one day. He took up his
pea-shooter and aimed carefully. The pea did not embed itself deeply
into the gardener's skull as William had sometimes thought it would.
It bounced back. It bounced back quite hard. The gardener also bounced
back with a yell of anger, shaking his fist at William's window. But
William had dis