"I have got a sad story to tell,"
Said Betty one day to mamma:
"'Twill be long, ma'am, before John is well,
On his eye is so dreadful a scar.

"Master Wilful enticed him away,
To join with some more little boys;
They went in the garden to play,
And I soon heard a terrible noise.

"Master Wilful had laid a long train
Of gunpowder, ma'am, on the wall;
It has put them to infinite pain,
For it blew up, and injured them all.

"John's eyebrow is totally bare;
Tom's nose is bent out of its place;
Sam Bushy has lost all his hair;
And Dick White is quite black in the face."


Note.--As a matter of fact, a train of gunpowder does not make a terrible noise; it makes hardly any noise at all--a mere pfff! and though John, Sam Bushy, and Dick White are shown to have been hurt as they might have been, a train of gunpowder could not bend Tom's nose, it could only burn it. Probably Mrs. Turner did not often play with explosives herself, and therefore did not know. Master Wilful seems to have escaped altogether.