The Small Boy Not "a Slummix."

The Small Boy Not "a Slummix."

Detroit Free Press.

  It is often charged by writers that the small boy is a "slummix." That is to say, he goes sloshing around with his thoughts at the North Pole and his eye on the south, and it is all the same to him runs over a street-car or knocks down a lamp-post. Such attacks on the small boy arise from pure jealousy. One of them, and one who may often been attacked by jealous historians and small-minded poets, was waiting on a Woodward avenue corner yesterday, when afar up the street he espied a load of hay. The farmer on the load was smoking. That small boy had been sent on an errand and told to hurry up or he'd get his jacket nicely dusted, but he no sooner saw the hay and the smoke than he jumped over a fence and lay flat on his stomach. In a few minutes along came the load. The horses were on the walk and the driver on the puff. He had just got down to where the tobacco tasted good, and was making the most, of it. As the load was passing; the boy drew in his breath and shouted, 'Fire! Fire!" at the top of his voice. The effect on that farmer was wonderful. He threw the pipe clear to the curbstone, rolled off his load to the pavement, jumped up, and had begun unharnessing his horses when a pedestrian demanded the cause of his excitement.

 "Some one hollered fire, and I thought it was the hay," he explained. 

   He walked all around the load, sniffed at it, and when certain that, there was no fire he shook his fist at every house in the neighborhood and climbed back to his seat and drove on.

    If that boy had been a slummix he wouldn't have seen the hay. If he had been careless he wouldn't have put the hay and pipe together. If he had been a mope he wouldn't have reasoned:  

   "One load of hay, plus one pipe, equals two yells which lifted that fellow out of his boots."