thing for this
world. Now, honest?"

"Lookahere," said the grocery man, who had been looking at the boy in
dismay, "You better go right home, and let your Ma fix up some warm
drink for you, and put you to bed. You are all wrong in the head, and if
you are not attended to you will have brain fever. I tell you, boy, you
are in danger. Come I will go home with you."

"O, danger, nothin'. I am just telling how things look to a boy who has
not got the facilities for being too good in his youth. Some boys can
take things as they read them, and not think any for themselves, but
I am a Thinker from Thinkerville, and my imagination plays the dickens
with me. There is nothing I read about old times but what I compare it
with the same line of business at the present day. Now, when I think of
the fishermen of Galilee, drawing their seines, I wonder what they would
have done if there had been a law against hauling seines, as there is
in Wisconsin to-day, and I can see a constable with a warrant for the
arrest of the Galilee fishermen, snatching the old apostles and taking
them to the police station in a patrol wagon. I know it is wrong to
think like that, but how can I help it? Say, suppose those fishermen had
been out hauling their seines, and our minister should come along with
his good clothes on, his jointed rod, his nickle-plated reel, and his
silk fish line, and his patent fish hook, and put a frog on the hook
and cast his line near the Galilee fish-man and go to trolling for bass?
What do you suppose the lone fisherman of the Bible times would have
thought about the gall of the jointed rod fisherman? Do you suppose they
would have thrown stones in the water where he was trolling, or would
they have told him there was good trolling around a point about half a
mile up the shore, where they knew he wouldn't get a bite in a week, the
way a fellow of Muskego lake lied to our minister a spell ago? I tell
you, boss, it is a sad thing for a boy to have an imagination," and the
boy put his other knee in the sling made by the clenched fingers of both
hands, and waited for the grocery man to argue with him.

"I wish you would go away from here. I am afraid of you," said the
grocery man. "I would give anything if you Pa or the minister would come
in and have a talk with you. Your mind is wandering," and the grocery
man went to the door and looked up and down street to see if somebody
wouldn't come in and watch the crazy boy, while he w