tting so you reach out too far with that small mind of yours. In about
another year you will want to run this world yourself. I don't think you
are reforming very much. It is wicked for a boy your size to argue about
such things. Your folks better send you to college."

"What do I want to go to college for, and be a heartless hazer, and a
poor base ball player. I can be bad enough at home. The more I read, the
more I think. I don't believe I can ever be good enough to go to heaven,
anyway, and I guess I will go into the newspaper business, where they
don't have to be good, and where they have passes everywhere. Do you
know, I think when I was built they left out a cog wheel or something in
my head. I can't think like some boys. I get to thinking about Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden, and of the Dude with the cloven hoof that
flirted with Eve, and treated her and Adam to the dried apples, and I
can't think of them as some boys do, with a fig leaf polonaise, and fig
leaf vests. I imagine them dressed up in the latest style. I know it is
wrong, but that it what a poor boy has to suffer who has an imagination,
and where did I get the imagination? This confounded imagination of mine
shows me Adam with a plug hat on, just like our minister wears, and
a stand up collar, and tight pants, and peaked-toed shoes, and Eve is
pictured to me with a crushed-angleworm colored dress, and brown striped
stockings, and newspapers in her dress to make it stick out, and a hat
with dandelions on, and a red parasol, and a lace handkerchief, which
she puts to her lips and winks with her left eye to the masher who is
standing by the corner of the house, in an attitude, while the tail with
the dart on the end is wound around the rain water barrel, so Eve won't
see it and get scared. Say, don't you think it is better for a boy to
think of our first parents with clothes on, than to think of them almost
naked, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, with nothing but fig
leaves pinned on? I want to do right, as near as I can, but I had rather
think of them dressed like our folks are to-day, than to think of them
in a cyclone with leaves for wearing apparel. Say, it is wrong to fight,
but don't you think if Adam had put on a pair of boxing gloves, when he
found the devil was getting too fresh about the place, and knocked him
out in a couple of rounds, and pasted him in the nose, and fired him
out of the summer garden, that it would have been a big