being dressed, he suffered all the while with a severe case of
what is commonly called pouts, but which in reality is something
much sadder.

"My, my!" said Mother, as she drew a stocking over the pink toes
of his right foot, "one mustn't look like that on his birthday."

"It is not my birthday," he said, not impertinently, but politely
and woefully.

Even a pair of new shoes did not prove that this was his
birthday, and yet they helped to prove it. One gets them at such
times as Christmas and birthdays, and such a delightful squeak
was in these shoes that David could scarcely eat his breakfast
for wanting to walk about in them. If a circus should come to
town, he would now be ready for it; he had the shoes. And
besides, there were tassels on them--wonderful tassels. It is
much easier to be a brave soldier-man if they have tassels.

Do you know what it is to be a brave soldier-man? Well, to be
that, one must be kind and sweet and unselfish and do right. And
doing right is doing mostly what you don't want to do. To wash a
lot--that is right; to keep your fingers out of the pie--that is
right; to keep your hands from spilling mucilage on the cat's
back--that is right. If you make dents with a tack-hammer in
Mother's piano, that is not right; that is a surprise.

The only safe way of doing right is to think of what you would
rather do, and then do something else. But often this is such
hard work that sometimes one doesn't care much about being a