labour. "Jinny's
baking a cake I'm going to send for his birthday party. Bring him in the
house. I've got something for him."

She led the way to her "sitting-room," which had a pleasant smell,
unlike any other smell, and, opening the drawer of a shining old
what-not, took therefrom a boy's "sling-shot," made of a forked stick,
two strips of rubber and a bit of leather.

"This isn't for you," she said, placing it in Penrod's eager hand.
"No. It would break all to pieces the first time you tried to shoot
it, because it is thirty-five years old. I want to send it back to your
father. I think it's time. You give it to him from me, and tell him
I say I believe I can trust him with it now. I took it away from him
thirty-five years ago, one day after he'd killed my best hen with
it, accidentally, and broken a glass pitcher on the back porch with
it--accidentally. He doesn't look like a person who's ever done things
of that sort, and I suppose he's forgotten it so well that he believes
he never DID, but if you give it to him from me I think he'll remember.
You look like him, Penrod. He was anything but a handsome boy."

After this final bit of reminiscence--probably designed to be repeated
to Mr. Schofield--she disappeared in the direction of the kitchen,
and returned with a pitcher of lemonade and a blue china dish sweetly
freighted with flat ginger cookies of a composition that was her own
secret. Then, having set this collation before her guests, she presented
Penrod with a superb, intricate, and very modern machine of destructive
capacities almost limitless. She called it a pocket-knife.

"I suppose you'll do something horrible with it," she said, composedly.
"I hear you do that with everything, anyhow, so you might as well do it
with this, and have more fun out of it. They tell me you're the Worst
Boy in Town."

"Oh, Aunt Sarah!" Mrs. Schofield lifted a protesting hand.

"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Crim.

"But on his birthday!"

"That's the time to say it. Penrod, aren't you the Worst Boy in Town?"

Penrod, gazing fondly upon his knife and eating cookies rapidly,
answered as a matter of course, and absently, "Yes'm."

"Certainly!" said Mrs. Crim. "Once you accept a thing about yourself
as established and settled, it's all right. Nobody minds. Boys are just
people, really."

"No, no!" Mrs. Schofield cried, involuntarily.

"Yes, they are," returned Aunt Sarah. "Only they're not quite so awful,
because they haven't