d in this story, though. I'm not quite sure, but the very
minute my pal, Poetry, and I saw the picture in a book called _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_, we both had a very mischievous idea come into
our minds, which we couldn't get out no matter how we tried....

This is the way it happened.... Poetry and I were in his house, in
fact, I was staying at his house all night one night, and just before
we went to sleep, we sat up in his big bed for awhile, looking at the
picture which was a full-paged glossy picture of a man school teacher
away up on the roof of a country schoolhouse, and he was holding a
wide board across the top of the chimney. The schoolhouse's only door
was open and a gang of tough-looking boys was tumbling out, along with
a lot of smoke.

"Have you ever read the story?" I said to Poetry, and he said, "No,
have you?" and when I said "No," we both read a part of it. The story
was about a man teacher whose very bad boys in the school had locked
him out of the building, and he had climbed up on the roof of the
school and put a board across the chimney, and smoked them out just
like a boy smokes a skunk out of a woodchuck den along Sugar Creek.

_That_ put the idea in our heads, and it stayed there until a week or
two after Christmas, before it got us into trouble.... Then just like
a time-bomb exploding, all of a sudden that innocent idea which an
innocent author had written in an innocent library book,
exploded--and--Well, here goes the story.

It was a swell Saturday afternoon at our house with bright sunlight on
the snow and the weather just right for coasting. I was standing by
our kitchen sink, getting ready to start wiping a big stack of dishes
which my mom had just rinsed with steaming hot water out of the
teakettle. I was just reaching for a drying towel when Mom said,
"Better wash your hands first, Bill," which I had forgotten to do like
I once in a while do. Right away I washed my hands with soap, in our
bathroom, came back and grabbed the towel off the rack by the range,
and started in carefully wiping the dishes, not exactly wanting to, on
account of the clock on our mantel-shelf said it was one o'clock, and
the gang was supposed to meet on Bumblebee hill right that very
minute, with our sleds, and we were going to have the time of our
lives coasting, and rolling in the snow, and making huge balls and
snow men and everything....

You should have seen those dishes fly--that is, they _started_ to!