. Sadoc Smith. Mrs. Smith
did not like boys and she kept Henry in kilts until he was of an age when
most lads are looking forward to long trousers. She made him wear
Fauntleroy suits and kept his hair in curls down his back--molasses
colored curls that disgusted the boy mightily. Finally he hired another
boy for ten cents and a glass agate to cut the curls off close to his
head, and he stole a pair of long trousers, a world too wide for him, from
a neighbor's line. He then set out on his travels, going in an empty
freight car from the Lumberton railroad yards.

But he was caught and brought back, literally "by the scruff of his neck;"
and his grandmother was never ending in her talk about the escapade. The
curls remained short, however. If she refused to give Curly twenty cents
occasionally to have his hair cut, he would stick burrs or molasses taffy
in the hair so that it had to be kept short.

There seemed an affinity between this scapegrace lad and Amy Gregg. Not
that she possessed any abundance of spirit; but she would listen to Curly
romance about his adventures by the hour, and he could safely confide all
his secrets to Amy Gregg. Wild horses would not have drawn a word from her
as to his intentions, or what mischief he had already done.

Curly was a tall, thin boy of fifteen, wiry and strong, and with a face as
smooth and pink-and-white as a girl's. That he was so girlish looking was
a sore subject with the boy, and whenever any unwise boy called him
"Girly" instead of "Curly" it started a fight, there and then.

Henry was forbidden by his grandmother to bother the girls from Briarwood
Hall in any way, and to make sure that he played no tricks upon them, when
Ruth and her mates came to the house to lodge, Mrs. Smith housed Curly in
a little, steep-roofed room over the summer kitchen.

It was a cold and uncomfortable place, he told Amy Gregg. Ruth heard him
tell her so, but judged that it would not be wise to beg Mrs. Smith for
other quarters for her grandson. She was not a woman to whom one could
easily give advice--especially one of Ruth's age and inexperience.

Mrs. Smith was a very grim looking woman with a false front of little,
corkscrew curls, the color of which did not at all match the iron-gray of
her hair. That the curls were made of Mrs. Smith's own hair, cropped from
her head many years before, there could be no doubt. It Nature had erred
in turning her actual hair to iron-gray in these, her later