I haven't been able to write anything for some time. I don't mean that there has been anything the matter with my fingers so that I couldn't hold a pen, but I haven't had the heart to write of my troubles. Besides, I have been locked up for a whole week in the spare bedroom on bread and water, and just a little hash or something like that, except when Sue used to smuggle in cake and pie and such things, and I haven't had any penanink. I was going to write a novel while I was locked up by pricking my finger and writing in blood with a pin on my shirt; but you can't write hardly anything that way, and I don't believe all those stories of conspirators who wrote dreadful promises to do all sorts of things in their blood. Before I could write two little words my finger stopped bleeding, and I wasn't going to keep on pricking myself every few minutes; besides, it won't do to use all your blood up that way. There was once a boy who cut himself awful in the leg with a knife, and he bled to death for five or six hours, and when he got through he wasn't any thicker than a newspaper, and rattled when his friends picked him up just like the morning paper does when father turns it inside out. Mr. Travers told me about him, and said this was a warning against bleeding to death.

Of course you'll say I must have been doing something dreadfully wrong, but I don't think I have; and even if I had, I'll leave it to anybody if Aunt Eliza isn't enough to provoke a whole company of saints. The truth is, I got into trouble this time just through obeying promptly as soon as I was spoken to. I'd like to know if that was anything wrong. Oh, I'm not a bit sulky, and I am always ready to admit I've done wrong when I really have; but this time I tried to do my very best and obey my dear mother promptly, and the consequence was that I was shut up for a week, besides other things too painful to mention. This world is a fleeting show, as our minister says, and I sometimes feel that it isn't worth the price of admission.

Aunt Eliza is one of those women that always know everything, and know that nobody else knows anything, particularly us men. She was visiting us, and finding fault with everybody, and constantly saying that men were a nuisance in a house and why didn't mother make father mend chairs and whitewash the ceiling and what do you let that great lazy boy waste all his time for? There was a little spot in the roof where it leaked when it rained, and Aunt Eliza said to father, "Why don't you have energy enough to get up on the roof and see where that leak is I would if I was a man thank goodness I ain't." So father said, "You'd better do it yourself, Eliza." And she said, "I will this very day."

So after breakfast Aunt Eliza asked me to show her where the scuttle was. We always kept it open for fresh air, except when it rained, and she crawled up through it and got on the roof. Just then mother called me, and said it was going to rain, and I must close the scuttle. I began to tell her that Aunt Eliza was on the roof, but she wouldn't listen, and said, "Do as I tell you this instant without any words why can't you obey promptly?" So I obeyed as prompt as I could, and shut the scuttle and fastened it, and then went down stairs, and looked out to see the shower come up.

It was a tremendous shower, and it struck us in about ten minutes; and didn't it pour! The wind blew, and it lightened and thundered every minute, and the street looked just like a river. I got tired of looking at it after a while, and sat down to read, and in about an hour, when it was beginning to rain a little easier, mother came where I was, and said, "I wonder where sister Eliza is do you know, Jimmy?" And I said I supposed she was on the roof, for I left her there when I fastened the scuttle just before it began to rain.

Nothing was done to me until after they had got two men to bring Aunt Eliza down and wring the water out of her, and the doctor had come, and she had been put to bed, and the house was quiet again. By that time father had come home, and when he heard what had happened— But, there! it is over now, and let us say no more about it. Aunt Eliza is as well as ever, but nobody has said a word to me about prompt obedience since the thunder-shower.

[Begun in Harper's Young People No. 94, August 16.]