Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Children's stories, American; Fantasy literature; Short stories, American
Jimmieboy had been taken to the photographer's and had posed several
times for the man who made pictures of little boys. One picture showed
how he looked leaning against a picket fence with a tiger skin rug under
his feet. Another showed him in the act of putting his hands into his
pockets, while a third was a miserable attempt to show how he looked
when he couldn't stand still. The last pleased Jimmieboy very much. It
made him laugh and Jimmieboy liked laughing better than anything,
perhaps, excepting custard, which was his idea of real solid bliss. Why
it made him laugh, I do not know, unless it was because in the picture
he was very much blurred and looked something like a mixture of a cloud
and a pin-wheel.
"I like that one," Jimmieboy said to his mother, when the proof came
home. "Won't you let me have it?"
"Yes," said his mother. "You can have it. I don't think any one else
wants it."
So the proof became Jimmieboy's property, and he put it away in his
collection of treasures, which already contained many valuable things,
such as the whistle of a rubber ball, a piece of elastic, and a worn-out
tennis racket. These treasures the boy used to have out two or three
times a day, and the last time he had them out something queer happened.
The blurred little figure in the picture spoke to him and told him
something he didn't forget in a hurry.
"You think I'm a funny-looking thing don't you?" said the blurred
picture of himself.
"Yes, I do," said Jimmieboy, "that's why I laugh at you whenever I see
you."
"Well, I laugh when I see you, too," retorted the picture. "You are just
as funny to look at sometimes as I am."
"I'm not either," said Jimmieboy. "I don't look like a cloud or a
pin-wheel, and you do."
"I'm a picture of you, just the same," returned the proof, "and if you
had stood still when the man was taking you, I'd have been all right.
It's awful mean the way little boys have of not standing still when
they are having their pictures taken, and then laughing at the thing
they're responsible for afterward."
"I didn't mean to be mean," said Jimmieboy.
"Perhaps not," retorted the picture, "but if it hadn't been for you I'd
have been a lovely picture, and your mamma would have had a nice little
silver frame put around me, and maybe I'd have been standing on your
papa's desk with the inkstand and the mucilage instead of having to live
all my life with a broken whistle and a tennis bat that nobody but you
has any use for."
Here the picture sighed, and Jimmieboy felt very sorry for it.
"Boys don't know what a terrible lot of horrid things happen because
they don't stand still sometimes," continued the picture. "I know of
lots of cases where untold misery has come from movey boys."
"From what?" queried Jimmieboy.
"Movey boys," replied the picture. "By that I mean boys that don't stand
still when they ought to. Why, I knew of a boy once who wouldn't stand
still and he shook a whole town to pieces."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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