“You little rascal!” he said, catching Phil up, and rolling him on the sofa; “don’t you dare to wriggle off there till I straighten up the muss you’ve made—do you hear me?”
“Phil vely good boy now!” saying which, the baby folded his fat hands together, and actually sat still until the table was restored to order.
Johnny gave the whole of his mind to his business, after this, and when Mrs. Waring came back, she paused outside the window to look and listen, and she laughed as she had not laughed for many a day. For there was her “troublesome comfort,” on Johnny’s back, shouting and shrieking with laughter, while Johnny cantered up and down the room, rearing, bolting, plunging, and whinnying.
“I don’t know how to thank you enough, dear,” she said, gratefully, when she at last opened the door. “I’ve got my money, and bought all I shall need for three or four days, and the walk’s done me good, and you’ve given baby such a game of romps as he hasn’t had in a month of Sundays. Poor little soul, it goes to my heart to pen him up so, but how am I to help it? He’ll sleep like a top to-night, and so shall I. You tell your dear mother that I say she has a son to be proud of.”
Johnny colored high with pleasure, and plans for missionary work among unplayed-with babies began to flock into his mind. He said nothing of them, however, remembering, just in time, one of his father’s rules,—
“Never promise the smallest thing which you are not sure of being able to perform.”
“I’m very glad if I’ve helped you, Mrs. Waring; he’s a jolly little chap, and it has really been good fun for both of us. But I ought to tell you—I began to study a little, when he seemed busy with his toys, and next thing I knew, he pulled off the table-cover and that large Bible, and it wasn’t my doings that it didn’t smash him!”
“Oh well, it didn’t! And a miss is as good as a mile,” said Mrs. Waring, cheerfully. She was so used to Phil’s hair-breadth escapes, that this one did not seem worth mentioning.
But Johnny went home, thinking at a great rate. Learning lessons was not wrong, nobody could say that it was. But it seemed that a thing good in itself could be made wrong, by being allowed to get out of place.
“It’s like what mamma said about ‘watching,’” he thought; “it isn’t that we must not ever do anything besides, but we mustn’t let anything ‘come between.’ If that little scamp had gone to sleep, now, it would have been no harm at all to pull my chair up to the sofa, so that he couldn’t roll off, and study till he woke. But he didn’t go to sleep!”