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The Boy usually kept his promises, however, and he was known even to
keep a candy-cane--twenty-eight inches long, red and white striped like
a barber's pole--for a fortnight, because his mother limited him to the
consumption of two inches a day. But he could not keep any knees to his
trousers; and when The Boy's mother threatened to sew buttons--brass
buttons, with sharp and penetrating eyes--on to that particular portion
of the garment in question, he wanted to know, in all innocence, how
they expected him to say his prayers!

One of Bob's earliest recollections of The Boy is connected with a toy
express-wagon on four wheels, which could almost turn around on its own
axis. The Boy imported this vehicle into Red Hook one summer, and they
used it for the transportation of their chestnuts and their currants and
their apples, green and ripe, and the mail, and most of the dust of the
road; and Bob thinks, to this day, that nothing in all these after years
has given him so much profound satisfaction and enjoyment as did that
little cart.

Bob remembers, too--what The Boy tries to forget--The Boy's daily
practice of half an hour on the piano borrowed by The Boy's mother from
Mrs. Bates for that dire purpose. Mrs. Bates's piano is almost the only
unpleasant thing associated with Red Hook in all The Boy's experience of
that happy village. It was pretty hard on The Boy, because, in The
Boy's mind, Red Hook should have been a place of unbroken delights. But
The Boy's mother wanted to make an all-round man of him, and when his
mother said so, of course it had to be done or tried. Bob used to go
with The Boy as far as Dr. Bates's house, and then hang about on the
gate until The Boy was released; and he asserts that the music which
came out of the window in response to The Boy's inharmonic touch had no
power whatever to soothe his own savage young breast. He attributes all
his later disinclination to music to those dreary thirty minutes of
impatient waiting.

The piano and its effect upon The Boy's uncertain temper _may_ have been
the innocent cause of the first, and only, approach to a quarrel which
The Boy and Bob ever had. The prime cause, however, was, of course, a
girl! They were playing, that afternoon, at Cholwell Knox's, when
Cholwell said something about Julia Booth which Bob resented, and there
was a fight, The Boy taking Cholwell's part; why, he cannot say, unless
it was because of his jealousy of Bob's affection