those in
the Handbook, and showed Johnnie and Grandpa how cock-fighting was done,
gave a demonstration of skunk tag, and proved that the soft, splintery
boards of the kitchen floor were finely adapted to mumbly peg.

That night on the roof, Johnnie hailed to him a score of scouts, along
with Jim Hawkins and David, Aladdin, and several of the younger Knights
of King Arthur. Then went forward a great game of duck on a rock,
followed by a relay race and dodge-ball. The roof had come to mean more
and more to Johnnie of late, but now he felt especially glad that he had
it to go to. During the past few weeks he had frequented it under every
sort of summer-night sky. It was his weather station, his observatory,
his gymnasium, his park, his highway, his hilltop, his Crusoe's Island.
In the thinks he conjured up there, it was also his railroad station,
for he traveled far and wide from it on trains that went puffing away
from that little house built at the top of the stairs; and it was his
wharf, to which tall-masted ships came with the swift quiet of so many
pigeons. But now the roof was for him still another place--besides a
health resort: it was his playground for all those scout games.

But he and Mr. Perkins had not stopped at that chapter on Games. From
cover to cover Johnnie absorbed the Handbook, reading even the Appendix
and the Index! He read the advertisements, too, and came to own a kodak,
a junior rifle, a watch, a scout axe, and various other desirable
things. But the merit badge he did not own. He meant to earn that, to
have it really--not just as a think; for which reason he never lagged in
the matter of his meal getting.

Big Tom profited through this determination of Johnnie's. Night after
night he had biscuits and gravy. He had apple sauce where formerly
Johnnie would have let the longshoreman eat his green apples uncooked.
Barber profited, too, in the amount of work Johnnie did every day,
promptly and thoroughly, and in those good turns which served to make
old Grandpa happier.

Now as Johnnie waited for Cis to return from the area, he pondered on
the difference between Big Tom and Mr. Perkins. The latter had often
pointed out to Johnnie that it did not cost anything to be either polite
or cheerful, and the boy liked being both. Why was Big Tom neither?
"Mister Barber, what does 'Birds of a feather flock t'-gether' mean?" he
inquired.

Barber had on a white collar and his best coat. His shoes were laced,