“My name is Georgie Gackett. Yesterday I turned eight, and Mom asked what I wanted as a gift. I said ‘a diary’…! ” This line—little Georgie said it—one hundred and thirty-four years ago, in 1880, when American writer Mette Victoria Fuller first published the story “The Diary of a Mischievous Boy.” Isn’t that charming? Many parents would be pleased if their child made such a statement. The Gackett family probably would be delighted, too—after all, what an unusually mature child they have! A delightful child!! Soon you will meet a boy who did his best to run the family life of his three sisters: from under the table he bit the pastor’s leg with sugar tongs, he hijacked a train, he shouted everything said about him in the house into the old, sick, wealthy and deaf uncle’s hearing tube, he flew away in a hot-air balloon with one professor and performed many other “exploits.”