The two boys rose, upon command, descended the ladder
after Mr. Schofield, bringing Duke with them, and
stood before the authors of their being, who bent
upon them sinister and threatening brows. With
hanging heads and despondent countenances, each still
ornamented with a moustache and an imperial, Penrod
and Sam awaited sentence.
This is a boy’s lot: anything he does,
anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have
been a crime—he never knows.
And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.
Mr. Williams took his son by the ear.
“You march home!” he commanded.
Sam marched, not looking back, and his father followed
the small figure implacably.
“You goin’ to whip me?” quavered
Penrod, alone with Justice.
“Wash your face at that hydrant,” said
his father sternly.
About fifteen minutes later, Penrod, hurriedly entering
the corner drug store, two blocks distant, was astonished
to perceive a familiar form at the soda counter.
“Yay, Penrod,” said Sam Williams.
“Want some sody? Come on. He didn’t
lick me. He didn’t do anything to me at
all. He gave me a quarter.”
“So’d mine,” said Penrod.
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy.
The last term of the school-year is made of decades,
not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting
for the millennium. But they do pass, somehow,
and at last there came a day when Penrod was one of
a group that capered out from the gravelled yard of
“Ward School, Nomber Seventh,” carolling
a leave-taking of the institution, of their instructress,
and not even forgetting Mr. Capps, the janitor.
“Good-bye, teacher! Good-bye, school!
Good-bye, Cappsie, dern ole fool!”
Penrod sang the loudest. For every boy, there
is an age when he “finds his voice.”
Penrod’s had not “changed,” but he
had found it. Inevitably that thing had come
upon his family and the neighbours; and his father,
a somewhat dyspeptic man, quoted frequently the expressive
words of the “Lady of Shalott,” but there
were others whose sufferings were as poignant.
Vacation-time warmed the young of the world to pleasant
languor; and a morning came that was like a brightly
coloured picture in a child’s fairy story.
Miss Margaret Schofield, reclining in a hammock upon
the front porch, was beautiful in the eyes of a newly
made senior, well favoured and in fair raiment, beside
her. A guitar rested lightly upon his knee, and
he was trying to play—a matter of some difficulty,
as the floor of the porch also seemed inclined to
be musical. From directly under his feet came
a voice of song, shrill, loud, incredibly piercing
and incredibly flat, dwelling upon each syllable with
incomprehensible reluctance to leave it.
“I have lands
and earthly pow-wur.
I’d give all for
a now-wur,
Whi-ilst setting at
my-Y-Y dear old mother’s knee-ee,
So-o-o rem-mem-bur whilst
you’re young——”
