The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

DISCUSSING BOB'S WHIPPING.

243

"Now you jess shet up, every one o' you! " sternly commanded Dick. " You don't know nothin' at all about this
affair. Bob Blackstock deserved this lickin', an' I'm glad
Jim give it to 'im."
"Bob sassed me an' called names! " shouted the unsubdued and unterrified Jim. "I'll lick 'im again when I catch
' im!"
"If Bob Blackstock had sassed me as he did Jim, an'
called such names," said Dick, taking the floor, and speaking oracularly, hands in his pockets as usual, " I'd a spiled
his pretty face for a year. Jim didn't lick him half
enough."
" Oh, Dick, I'm tired of this kind of talk' Must you
punish everybody who happens to say what you don't like
Because a boy is vulgar and ungentlemanly, must you
drop down to his level, and fight with him as if you were
dogs? If a man should be saucy to your father, who is a
gentleman, do you suppose he would beat and scratch him,
and tear and bite him, as animals do when they are enraged
with one another?"
" No," said Dick proudly, standing erect, and holding his
head very high, "he'd draw his pistol and shoot him on the
spot. Or, if the man was a gentleman, like himself, he'd
send him a challenge, an' they'd fight a duel. I shall do
that when I'm grown up."
This was new doctrine to me at that time, and I looked
helplessly around the little group of children, all of whom
hastened to endorse Dick's statement.
"He would," they said, nodding assent; " that's the way
they do down here."
"Pa would never fight with his fists," said Laura; "no
gentleman would. But you know it's different when they
fight with pistols. That's gentlemanly."