else, and he walked me over to the house and told Father what I'd done, and said I'd put the rope across the street on purpose to trip people up, and had jerked it when he came along. I suppose he thought I did.
"Father wouldn't let me say a word to explain; but went out and looked at the rope, and then took me up stairs and thrashed me;—the first time I'd ever had a real thrashing in my life. He used a piece of the rope to do it. Then he told me that I wasn't to go out of the house for one month,—that it wasn't safe for a person like me to be at large. He never let me say one word about how it happened. When I would try to tell him, he'd press his lips together and say:—'I don't wish to hear anything about it—I saw the rope.' Mother and Flo were away that Summer, so I was all alone.
"For one month I never set my foot outside of the house, not even onto the veranda; and during the whole time, I was just sitting and staring at the injustice of it all. A kid eight years old can do an awful lot of thinking in a case like that, and it lasts him for a mighty long time. When any of the boys asked Father where I was,
