to be able to make a record yet if he could
hold on till his time was fully up. If everything else failed he had his
dying speech to fall back on.

He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go
to sea as a cabin-boy. He called on a ship-captain and made his
application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he
proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, "To Jacob Blivens, from
his affectionate teacher." But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and
he said, "Oh, that be blowed! that wasn't any proof that he knew how to
wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him."
This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to
Jacob in all his life. A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had
never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open
the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift it never had in
any book that ever he had read. He could hardly believe his senses.

This boy always had a hard time of it. Nothing ever came out according
to the authorities with him. At last, one day, when he was around
hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old
iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which
they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament
with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails. Jacob's heart
was touched. He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded
grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by
the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones. But just
at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in. All the bad
boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began
one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always
commence with "Oh, sir!" in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good
or bad, ever starts a remark with "Oh, sir." But the alderman never
waited to hear the rest. He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him
around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in
an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away
toward the sun with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after
him like the tail of a kite. And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or
that old iron-foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young
Jacob Blivens, he nev