HOW HE GOT EVEN.

Evening Star, Issue 10339, 12 June 1897, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOW HE GOT EVEN.

Lawrence Hutton, in an article in ' Harper's Round Table,' tells the following good story of an April fool joke that his father played on him, and the way he got even:—

In my bread-and-butter days I was a frequent and unhappy victim of what Shakespeare ca'ls a raging tooth. A loDg siege with a certain molar had left me, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. My father had walked the floor with me, and had groaned with me, and had suffered in his feelings and his sympathies more, perhaps, than had suffered, in a physical way, the patient himself. He was going that morning to attend the funeral of his old friend Doctor M'Pherson, and he asked me, before he left the houseto which I was confined—what I thought I would like him to bring me back—a way of his whenever I was in any serious condition of invalidism. I demanded, without hesitation, a brick of maple-sugar—a very strange request certainly from a person in my peculiar condition, aud one which appealed strongly to his owe sense of the ridiculous.

When he returned at dinner time he carried the brick, enveloped in many series of papers, beginning with the coarsest kind, and ending with the finest kind ; and each of the wrappers was fastened with its own particular bit of cord or ribbon, all of them tied in the hardest of hard knots. The process of disentanglement was long and laborious, but it was persistently performed; and when the brick was revealed, lo ! it v.'as just a brick; not of maple sugar, but a plain, ordinary red clay building brick, which he had taken from some pile of similar bricks on his way up town. The disappointment was not very bitter, for I knew.that something else was coming ; and I realised that it was the Ist of April, and that I had been April-fooled ! The something eke, I remember, was that most amusing of amusing books, George Derby's 'Phcenixina,': then just published ; ard over it I forgot' my toothache, but not my maple sugar. All this happened when I was about twelve years of age, and I have ever since associated "Squibob" with the sweet sap of the maple, never with raging teeth. It was necessary, however, to get even with my father; not an easy mattor, I knew. And I consulted my Uncle John, a youth some six or eight years my senior. He advised patient waiting. The father, he said t was absolutely devoted to the 'Commercial Advertiser,' whioh he read every day from frontispiece to end—market report, book notices, obituary notices, advertisements, aud all and if I could hold myself in for a whole year my Uncle John thought it would be worth it. The ' Commercial Advertiser -of that date was put safely away for a twelvemonth ; and on the Ist of April next it was produced, carefully folded and properly dampened, and was placed by the side of my father's plate, the mother and son making no remark, but eagerly awaiting the result. The journal wa3 vigorously scanned j no item of news or of business import was missed until the reader came to the funeral announcements on the third page. Then he looked at the top of the paper through his spectacles, and then he looked over his spectacles at me, who was very busy with my bread and milk, and he made but one remark. The subject, like that of the tailor's bill, was never referred to afterwards between us. But he looked at the top of the paper, and he looked at me, and he said: "My Son, T see that old Doctor M'Pherson is dead again !"