"And now, Penrod," said his mother, after breakfast, "I'm going to
take you out in the country to pay your birthday respects to Aunt Sarah
Crim."
Aunt Sarah Crim, Penrod's great-aunt, was his oldest living relative.
She was ninety, and when Mrs. Schofield and Penrod alighted from a
carriage at her gate they found her digging with a spade in the garden.
"I'm glad you brought him," she said, desisting from labour. "Jinny's
baking a cake I'm going to send for his birthday party. Bring him in the
house. I've got something for him."
She led the way to her "sitting-room," which had a pleasant smell,
unlike any other smell, and, opening the drawer of a shining old
what-not, took therefrom a boy's "sling-shot," made of a forked stick,
two strips of rubber and a bit of leather.
"This isn't for you," she said, placing it in Penrod's eager hand.
"No. It would break all to pieces the first time you tried to shoot
it, because it is thirty-five years old. I want to send it back to your
father. I think it's time. You give it to him from me, and tell him
I say I believe I can trust him with it now. I took it away from him
thirty-five years ago, one day after he'd killed my best hen with
it, accidentally, and broken a glass pitcher on the back porch with
it--accidentally. He doesn't look like a person who's ever done things
of that sort, and I suppose he's forgotten it so well that he believes
he never DID, but if you give it to him from me I think he'll remember.
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