He loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about being a Sunday-school-book boy.

He knew it was not healthy to be good.
He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good as the boys in the books were; he knew that none of them had ever been able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral in the back part of it.

It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book that couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was dying.

So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best he could under the circumstances--to live right, and hang on as long as he could, and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.
But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys in the books.

They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it all happened just the other way.