The Quilt that Jack Built; How He Won the Bicycle | Page 4

felt that it was something very solemn indeed which had just taken place.
[Illustration: "'DEAR AS IT IS TO ME, IT IS NOT SO DEAR AS THE KEEPING OF MY WORD.'"]
Johnny's little room at the head of the stairs was heated by the hall stove, so that the door stood open all day long. When the new quilt was folded across the foot of his bed, it was the first thing that caught the eye of every one passing up the stairs.
Rob made up a verse about it, which he sang so often to tease Johnny that the first note was enough to make the child bristle up for a fight:
"This is the patchwork all forlorn, Made by the boys in Marshall's barn. The dog and the cat and even the rat Had a hand in that-- A hand in the Quilt that Jack built!"
"You needn't make fun of it," said Rhoda one day. "It has held me to my word more than once. Yesterday, for instance. I would have broken my promise to poor little Miss Sara Grimes, to help her entertain her old ladies, and would have accepted Harry Dilling's invitation, which came later, to go sleighing. But that quilt would not let me. It showed me mother as she stood there with her precious little gold piece, saying. '_We must keep our word at any cost!_' After that I couldn't disappoint poor old Miss Sara."
"I know," answered Rob, softly, looking up from his algebra. "It's served me the same way. It lies there like the exponent of a higher power,--the exponent of mother's standards and ideals that she expects us to raise ourselves up to."
Mr. Marshall made a similar confession one day, and it seemed that Johnny alone was the only member of the family who had no sentiment in regard to the quilt, except, perhaps, a feeling of gratitude. It had brought him the rifle. He snuggled down under it on cold winter nights, tumbled out from under it on cold winter mornings, and went his happy-go-lucky way, regardless of what it might have said to him if he had had ears to hear. Then, when, worn and faded by many washings, it outgrew its usefulness as he outgrew his boyhood, one spring morning his mother packed it carefully away in folds of old linen and lavender.
It was toward the middle of John Marshall's freshman year at college. The boy "all wriggle and racket" was a strong, athletic young fellow now, still with the same propensities of his restless boyhood. His overflowing animal spirits made him a jolly companion, and he found himself popular from the start. There was no need now for petty economies in the Marshall homestead. Business had been prosperous since that one hard winter when Johnny made patchwork to pay for his gun, and he found himself now with as liberal an allowance as any one in his class.
"I'm in for having a royal good time," he wrote to Rhoda, who was home-keeper now, for it had been two years since her mother's death, and Rhoda had done her best to fill the vacant place to them all. "And you needn't preach to me, Sis," he wrote. "I'm all right, and I'm not going to get into the trouble which you cheerfully predict. I shall not get into any scrapes that I can't skin out of; but a fellow would be a fool who didn't squeeze as much fun as possible out of his college life."
As he was finishing this letter, three students, who were foremost in all the fun going, came tumbling unceremoniously into his room. "Say, you there, Marshall," cried the first one, "hustle up and get ready for a lark to-night. You know that Sophomore Wilson, the long-faced fellow the boys call Squills? He's rooming in the old Baptist parsonage away out on the edge of town. It's vacant now, and they're glad to let him have a room free for the sake of somebody to guard the premises. We've found that he will be out to-night, sitting up with a sick frat., so we've planned to borrow the parsonage in his absence to give a swell dinner. Tingley and Jones will visit several hen-roosts in our behalf, and we'll roast the fowls in the parsonage stove. If you'll just set up the champagne, Jacky, my boy, we'll be 'Yours for ever, little darling,' and we'll gamble on the green of the defunct parson's study table 'till morning doth appear.'"
He took out a new deck of cards as he spoke, and slapped significantly on his overcoat pocket, bulging with packages of cigarettes.
"What if Squills should come back unexpectedly?" asked Johnny.
"Oh, that's all arranged. We'll toss him up in a blanket until he hasn't breath enough left to squeal on us.