rty or the Tennessee Shad, and
watching others scampering around the diamond in incomprehensible
activity; but the month was the month of April and his years sixteen.
In the first week of May Stover awakened, the drowsiness dropped from
him and the spirit of perpetual motion again returned. Still, the
distance between himself and his past remained. He had changed, become
graver, more laconic, moving with sedateness, like Garry Cockrell,
whose tricks of speech and gestures he imitated, holding himself
rather aloof from the populace, curiously conscious that the change
had come, and sometimes looking back with profound melancholy on the
youth that had now passed irrevocably away.

During this period of somewhat fragile self-importance, the
acquaintance with Tough McCarty had strengthened into an eternal
friendship in a manner that had a certain touch of humor.

McCarty, after the close of the football season, had repeatedly sought
out his late antagonist, but, though Dink at the bottom of his soul
was thrilled with the thought that here at last was the friend of
friends, the Damon to his Pythias, the chum who was to stand shoulder
to his shoulder, and so on, still there was too much self-conscious
pride in him to yield immediately to this feeling.

McCarty perceived the reserve without quite analyzing it, and was
puzzled at the barriers that still intervened.

During the winter, when Dink was resolutely set in the pursuit of that
beau-ideal, which had a marked resemblance with a certain creation of
Bret Harte's, Mr. Jack Hamlin, "gentleman sport," as Dennis would have
called him, McCarty found little opportunity for friendly intercourse.
He disapproved of many of Dink's friendships, not so much from a
moralistic point of view as from Stover's not exercising the principle
of selection. As this phase was intensified and Stover became the
object of criticism of his classmates for hanging at the heels of
fifth-formers and neglecting his own territory, McCarty resolved that
the plain duty of a friend required him to administer a moral lecture.

This heroic resolve threw him into confusion for a week, for, in the
first place, he had been accustomed to receive rather than to give
words of warning and, in the second place, he was fully aware of the
difficulties of opening up the subject at all.

After much anxious and gloomy cogitation he hit upon a novel plan
and, approaching Stover at the end of the last recitation, gave