Lewie; Or, The Bended TwigBradford, Sarah H. (Sarah Hopkins)
General
Lewie; Or, The Bended Twig
Bradford, Sarah H. (Sarah Hopkins)
Fiction
For sometime prudence restrained Lewie from making an attack upon this
boy, so much larger and stronger than himself, for he was almost
certain that he would get the worst of it in an encounter with him. But
one day when Colton was more aggravating than ever, Lewie suddenly lost
all command of himself, and flew at him in a most fearful storm of
rage, and with all the might of his passion concentrated in one blow,
he dashed the great boy against a tree; and after he was down, and
lying insensible, with his head cut and bleeding, Lewie could scarcely
be restrained, by the united strength of those about him, from rushing
upon his senseless body, and by renewed blows continuing to injure him.
His rage was fearful to witness, and his companions stood aghast, for
they saw clearly that murder was in his heart, and that nothing but the
restraint they exercised upon him, prevented him from carrying his
horrible purpose into execution. Colton was borne to the house, and it
was long feared that he would never entirely recover from the effects
of the severe blow upon his head as he fell. Lewie seemed to feel
nothing like remorse; he had always hated Colton, and everything this
boy had done had tended to increase and aggravate his feelings of
dislike; he thought nothing in his frantic rage of the consequences to
himself, but would have rejoiced to see his tormentor dead at his feet.
This last affair decided Dr. Hamilton that it would not do to keep a
boy of such fierce, unrestrained temper, longer in the school. Lewie
had all this time been progressing rapidly in his studies; a fierce
ambition seemed to have seized upon, him, and he applied himself to his
books as if he had come to the determination that he would at least
rise superior to his school-mates, in his standing in the class, if
they would not acknowledge his superiority in anything else.
Dr. Hamilton called soon after Lewie’s attack upon Colton, to see Mrs.
Elwyn, and while he spoke of Lewie as one on whom he could justly be
proud, as the best and most forward scholar in his classes, he said it
was impossible for him to allow him to remain; that the lives of his
other pupils were hardly to be considered safe with so passionate a
companion, and for the sake of the reputation of his school, he must
ask her to save him the necessity of a public dismissal of her son. Sad
by this time were the forebodings of Mrs. Elwyn, but they were useless;
her remonstrances with her self-willed son were vain. If Lewie was
obliged to submit to being accompanied by his mother wherever he went,
he seemed determined to show her, that her wishes had not the slightest
power over him. The sowing time had passed;—the reaping time had begun.
Lewie no longer urged and entreated, but merely expressed his
determination to go to the school to which he had so long been desirous
to remove, and his poor mother knowing that henceforth his will must be
hers, made her preparations for accompanying him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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