“THERE!” said Davie Campbell, flinging as he spoke a large, sharp-pointed stick right where his brother stood, “take that; I don’t care if it does hurt you. I hate you, George Campbell!”

The stick was aimed even more surely than Davie in his blind rage imagined. It struck his brother’s side face, making an ugly wound, from which the blood flowed freely.

“Ah, ha!” said George, as he turned to the pump and began to bathe the wound, “look what you have done now. What will mother say to you, young man? And as for me, that will make a scar, and I will wear it all my life to remember you by. You will like that, won’t you? You will just enjoy having people ask me where I got that scar, and me having to tell that my beloved brother did it on purpose, because he hated me. Oh, ho! you are a jewel, you are,” and George Campbell laughed, and dodged just in time to escape a stone from his angry brother’s hand; then went off down the street, leaving Davie in a perfect rage.

He was three years younger than his brother, and was said by the neighbors to have a great deal worse disposition than George, but I never felt sure of that. However, it is quite true that instead of being master of his temper he let it master him. He had, also, a wretched habit of throwing anything he might happen to have in his hand when the angry fit seized him, letting it strike wherever it might. In this way he had narrowly escaped doing serious mischief, and he had promised himself hundreds of times that he would never, never throw things again, and yet, as soon as he grew angry, so settled was that habit upon him, that the stick or stone was apt to fly through the air. As for George, I think he was quite as easily angered as his brother, but his habit was to laugh, or sneer, or say the most taunting words imaginable, with a sort of superior smile on his face the while. On the whole, I am not sure that George appeared any better in the sight of Him who can read hearts than did his brother Davie.

They were not the worst boys in the world, by any means; they did not quarrel all the time. For days together they would succeed in being very friendly, and in having good times, but it must be confessed that George had discovered certain directions in which his young brother could be easily teased, and that he delighted to tease him.

“Davie is such a little spitfire,” he used to say to his Aunt Mary, when she argued with him about the sin of such a habit. “Why does he want to go off like a pop gun the first word that is said to him? I never do.”

“No,” said Aunt Mary; “you laugh—a laugh which makes him feel more angry than he did before, and you say something to increase his rage. Is that really being any better than he?” But these questions George did not like to answer.

On this particular morning, after having stopped the blood from his wound, he had sauntered away to see two of his friends who worked in the paper factory near at hand. There he mounted their work table and answered the questions which they eagerly put to him as to how he happened to get hurt.

“Oh! it is Davie’s work; he’s a great boy. If he had had an open jack-knife in his hand it would have been all the same; it would have been flung at me when he got mad. I hope when he grows up he will never take a notion to carry a pistol, for if he does he will shoot the first fellow who laughs at him, or who laughs when he is within hearing.”

“Why, George,” said one of the boys, “that will make an ugly scar.”

“I dare say it will. I will carry it all my life to remember him by.”

“It is a pity that he is such a little tiger; I wouldn’t stand it if I were you,” said the other boy. “You are a good deal older than he; why don’t you make him behave himself?”

In this way poor Davie was discussed by the three, George telling story after story about his brother, led on by the sympathy which the two professed, into making Davie the one always to blame, and himself the injured, long-suffering elder brother. The boys did not know Davie very well, and George had always been good-natured with them, so of course they were on his side, and ready to sympathize with him for having such a wicked little brother. The longer George talked the more of a martyr he grew to considering himself; he racked his brain for illustrations of Davie’s ill temper, and was in the midst of a very harrowing story when Joe Winters appeared, breathless with running, and panted out: “Is George Campbell here? I say, George Campbell, your folks want you to come home just as fast as you can. Davie has tumbled from the scaffolding of the big barn and killed himself! or—well, he ain’t dead; but he lies there still; can’t stir nor speak, and they have sent for two doctors, and everybody thinks he is going to die.”

Poor George Campbell! To have seen the look on his face when he heard this dreadful piece of news you would not have imagined that he could have had so hard an opinion of his little brother as he had been trying to show for the last hour. He jumped from the table, and made a dash for the door before Joe had finished his panting sentences, but paused with the door in his hand to say: “O, boys! it isn’t half of it true—what I have been telling you; I have been worse than Davie every time. If I hadn’t laughed at him, and teased him, and made fun of him, he never would have got angry at me. O, boys! if he dies it will kill me.” Then he ran.

What hours those were which followed, while the little brother lay on his bed, moaning steadily, but unconscious, so the doctors declared, and they shook their heads gravely in answer to questions, and would not give one ray of hope that he might by and by open his eyes and know them. Truth to tell, they thought he was going to die, and that very soon. But doctors are sometimes mistaken, and these were. Davie did not die; he lay day after day moaning with pain, not knowing any of the dear friends who bent over him; staring at George with wild, unnatural eyes, as if he were some comical object, instead of the brother who hovered about him, longing, oh! so eagerly for just one glance of recognition.

There came a day when the doctors said it was possible—just barely possible—that Davie might awaken from the long sleep into which he had fallen, and know his friends. How still they kept the house, and how silently the mother sat hour after hour by his bedside, relieved only by the little sister, who came on tiptoe to take her place, that she might go out and drink a cup of tea to help her bear the nervous strain. Even then she only went into the next room, separated from Davie’s by a curtain, and came back when she had got half-way across the room because she thought she heard a sound behind those curtains. There was no sound; Jennie was sitting quietly at her post, a wise little nurse; she held up a warning hand, ready to motion anybody back into silence who might be tiptoeing toward them. She had imagined it was George, for he, poor fellow, hovered near, looking almost as pale and worn as the boy with his head on the pillow.

Terrible days these had been to George. He was not sure that he ever prayed in his life before, but during those days he prayed with terrible earnestness, that Davie might not go away with those last words of his ringing in his ears. “If he could only know me long enough for me to ask him to forgive me!” said poor George to himself, while the tears rolled down his cheeks. “Then I think I would be almost willing to have him die. O, God! let me just tell him that I am sorry, and that I will not remember him in any such way, but I will think of the thousands of good and loving things he has done for me.”

I am sure you will be glad to know that his prayer was answered. Davie awoke from his long sleep with a look of quiet astonishment in his eyes, to think that he was lying in bed, and mother and Jennie were sitting beside him, and that George was standing over by the window. He did not remember any of the days that had passed between. He did not remember at first the fall from the scaffolding. He was by no means out of danger, the doctor said, yet there was a thread, just a thread of hope that he might rally. And so the days which followed were quite as full of anxiety and care as those in which he had been unconscious.

But Davie steadily gained, and there came a bright morning in midsummer when George was permitted to take care of him alone, while his mother attended to some household duties, and Jennie swept the dining-room and set the table. It was George’s opportunity. He had longed for it, but he did not know how to use it. How should he begin? While he considered, Davie began for him.

“It did leave a scar, didn’t it?” he said mournfully. “O, George! I remember all about it; it came to me just a few days ago. Wasn’t it awful? George, the hardest part has been to think that maybe I should die and leave that scar for you to remember me by.”

“Don’t,” said George, who had not the least idea that he should cry any more about this thing, yet who felt the tears starting in his eyes. “O, don’t, Davie! forget those horrid hateful things I said to you. You can’t think how many nice things I had to remember of you—hundreds and hundreds of them.”

“No,” said Davie mournfully; “I have always been throwing sticks and stones and hurting things. Don’t you remember how I lamed the cat, and killed a bird once, and then made that scar on your face? That is the worst of all. O, George! if I had died what a way to be remembered. Think of the lots of things that people could have told of me like that.”

George winced visibly, for these were some of the things he had told the boys in the paper factory that day.

“I tell you what it is,” he said, swallowing hard to try and speak without a tremble in his voice, “you and I have both had a lesson, Davie. If you had died I could never have forgiven myself for having teased you for getting angry, and then having said that I would remember you by this little scar, which doesn’t amount to anything, anyhow. It wasn’t true, Davie; I wouldn’t have remembered you that way.”

“I don’t see how you could have helped it,” said Davie mournfully; “but I am truly and surely going to be different after this. If you see me getting angry and acting as if I was going to throw things, I wish you would tie up my hands, or hold them, or something.”

“We will both be different,” said George. “It won’t do to plan such things as we had to remember. We will begin now and plan to have nice pleasant things, so that when—that when”—But his voice trembled and broke; he had been too near parting with Davie forever to put in words the thought that some time the parting would surely come.

But I fancy that they must have kept their words and begun over again, for this happened several years ago. George and Davie are young men now, and yesterday I heard them called “model brothers.” They really seem to be planning to have only pleasant things to remember of each other when the time comes for one of them to go away.

Pansy.