erate--"My, look behind you Aunt!" The old lady whirled around
and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant,
scrambling up the high board fence and dissapeared over it.

Susy and Clara were quite right about that.

Then Susy says:

And we know papa played "Hookey" all the time. And how readily
would papa pretend to be dying so as not to have to go to school!

These revelations and exposures are searching, but they are just If I am
as transparent to other people as I was to Susy, I have wasted much
effort in this life.

Grandma couldn't make papa go to school, no she let him go into a
printing-office to learn the trade. He did so, and gradually picked
up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who
were more studious in early life.

It is noticeable that Susy does not get overheated when she is
complimenting me, but maintains a proper judicial and biographical calm.
It is noticeable, also, and it is to her credit as a biographer, that
she distributes compliment and criticism with a fair and even hand.

My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed
it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger
than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and
truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the
relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. I was a
tonic. I was valuable to her. I never thought of it before, but now I
see it. I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward
any one else--but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as
heavily. It was his duty to report me, when I needed reporting and
neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that
duty. He is "Sid" in "Tom Sawyer." But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a
very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was.

It was Henry who called my mother's attention to the fact that the
thread with which she had sewed my collar together to keep me from going
in swimming, had changed color. My mother would not have discovered it
but for that, and she was manifestly piqued when she recognized that
that prominent bit of circumstantial evidence had escaped her sharp eye.
That detail probably added a detail to my punishment. It is human. We
generally visit our shortcomings on somebody else when there is a
possible excuse for it--but no matter, I