″‘Well,’ said I, ‘let the little orphan be yours. You bravely and kindly exerted yourself to save the mother’s life; now you must train her child carefully, for unless you do so its natural instinct will prove mischievous instead of useful to us.‘”
“All I could think of was that the teachers must’ve found the illegal stash of candy I’d been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they’d realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.”
“My dad says people who insist that you trust them usually don’t deserve it. You don’t need to give me more candy, but I earned the candy that I have. Everything you’ve had us do so far has seemed shady, and this new assignment is the shadiest yet. I just don’t trust you.”
“During our next outing, Marley surgically removed the woofer cone from the same speaker. The speaker wasn’t knocked over or in any way amiss; the paper cone was simply gone, as if someone had sliced it out with a razor blade. Eventually he got around to doing the same to the other speaker. Another time, we came home to find that our four-legged footstool was now three-legged, and there was no sign whatsoever—not a single splinter—of the missing limb.”
“A little curly-headed, good-for-nothing,
And mischief-making monkey from his birth;
His parents ne’er agreed except in doting
Upon the most unquiet imp on earth”
“The same thing happened to the Second Little Pig in his house of sticks. When the wolf tried again at the brick house of the Third Little Pig, the rude little porker called the cops on him. The wolf, speaking from behind bars, concludes his indignant testimonial by claiming he was framed.”
″ ‘But, King,’ he cried, ‘it was the iguana’s fault. He wouldn’t speak to me. And I thought he was plotting some mischief against me. When I crawled into the rabbit’s hole, I was only trying to hide.’ ”
“This Bad Harry and my naughty little sister used to play together quite a lot in Harry’s garden, or in our garden, and got up to dreadful mischief between them, picking all the baby gooseberries, and the green blackcurrants, and throwing sand on the flower-beds, and digging up the runner-bean seeds, and all the naughty sorts of things you never, never do in the garden.”
″‘So be a good boy and don’t get into mischief.’
This was a silly thing to say to a small boy at any time. It immediately made him wonder what sort of mischief he might get into.”