I\'ve made up my mind that half the trouble boys get into is the fault of the grown-up folks that are always wanting them to improve their minds.

I never improved my mind yet without suffering for it. There was the time I improved it studying wasps, just as the man who lectured about wasps and elephants and other insects told me to. If it hadn\'t been for that man I never should have thought of studying wasps.

One time our school-teacher told me that I ought to improve my mind by reading history, so I borrowed the history of Blackbeard the Pirate, and improved my mind for three or four hours every day. After a while father said, "Bring that book to me, Jimmy, and let\'s see what you\'re reading," and when he saw it, instead of praising me, he— But what\'s the use of remembering our misfortunes? Still, if I was grown up, I wouldn\'t get boys into difficulty by telling them to do all sorts of things.

There was a Professor came to our house the other day. A Professor is a kind of man who wears spectacles up on[Pg 151] the top of his head and takes snuff and doesn\'t talk English very plain. I believe Professors come from somewhere near Germany, and I wish this one had stayed in his own country. They live mostly on cabbage and such, and Mr. Travers says they are dreadfully fierce, and that when they are not at war with other people, they fight among themselves, and go on in the most dreadful way.

This Professor that came to see father didn\'t look a bit fierce, but Mr. Travers says that was just his deceitful way, and that if we had had a valuable old bone or a queer kind of shell in the house, the Professor would have got up in the night, and stolen it and killed us all in our beds; but Sue said it was a shame, and that the Professor was a lovely old gentleman, and there wasn\'t the least harm in his kissing her.

Well, the Professor was talking after dinner to father about balloons, and when he saw I was listening, he pretended to be awfully kind, and told me how to make a fire-balloon, and how he\'d often made them and sent them up in the air; and then he told about a man who went up on horseback with his horse tied to a balloon; and father said, "Now listen to the Professor, Jimmy, and improve your mind while you\'ve got a chance."

The next day Tom McGinnis and I made a balloon just as the Professor had told me to. It was made out of tissue-paper,[Pg 152] and it had a sponge soaked full of alcohol, and when you set the alcohol on fire th............