This text is part of:
[8]
termination; for the master was floated down several rods into deep water, and with difficulty saved himself from drowning.
There was a creek not far from his father's house, where it was customary to load sloops with wood.
Upon one of these occasions, he persuaded a party of boys to pry up a pile of wood and tip it into a sloop, in a confused heap.
Of course, it must all be taken out and reloaded.
When he saw how much labor this foolish trick had caused, he felt some compunction; but the next temptation found the spirit of mischief too strong to be resisted.
Coming home from his uncle's one evening, he stopped to amuse himself with taking a gate off its hinges.
When an old Quaker came out to see who was meddling with his gate, Isaac fired a gun over his head, and made him run into the house, as if an evil spirit were after him.
It was his delight to tie the boughs of trees together in narrow paths, that people travelling in the dark, might hit their heads against them; and to lay stones in the ruts of the road, when he knew that farmers were going to market with eggs, in the darkness of morning twilight.
If any mischief was done for miles round, it was sure to be attributed to Isaac Hopper.
There was no malice in his fun; but he had such superabounding life within him, that it would overflow, even when he knew that he must
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.