Our company has been selected. We need only a
handful of actors, but the manager has enlisted the street. The
dearest little girl has been chosen for Betsy, and each day she
practices her lullaby at the piano with uncertain, questing finger. A
gentle rowdy of twelve will speak the Duke's blood-curdling lines. I
understand that two quarrelsome pirates have nearly come to blows
which shall act the captain. The hero, Red Joe, will be played by the
manager himself, for it is he who owns the pistol. Is not the boy who
has the baseball the captain of his nine?

I owe an apology to all the mothers of our cast; for the rough
language of my lines outweighs their gentler home instruction.
Whenever several of our actors meet there is used the vile language of
the sea. By the bones of my ten fingers has replaced the anemic oaths
of childhood. One little girl has been told she cries as easily as a
crocodile. Another little girl was heard to say she would slit her
sister's _wisdom_--a slip, no doubt, for _wizen_. And Blast my lamps!
and Sink my timbers! are rolled profanely on the tongue.

In every attic on the street a rakish craft flies the skull and
crossbones, and roves the Spanish Main on rainy afternoons. Innocent
victims--girls, chiefly, who will tattle unless a horrid threat is
laid upon them--are forced blindfold to walk the plank. If the wind
blows, scratching the trees against the roof, it is, by their desire,
a tempest whirling their stout ship upon the rocks. What ho! We split!
Mysterious chalkings mark the cellar stairs and hint of treasure
buried in the coal-hole. At every mirror pirates practice their cruel
faces.

[Illustration: Innocent victims ... are forced blindfold to walk the
plank]

And now the daggers are complete, and their tip of blood has been
squeezed from its twisted tube. Chests and neighbors have been
rummaged for outlandish costumes. From the kindling-pile a
predestined stick has become the timber leg of the wicked Duke. The
butcher's hook has yielded to persuasion.

Presently rehearsals will begin--

* * * * *

I have been reading lately, and I have come on a sentence with which I
am in disagreement. I shall not tell the name of the book (mere
mulishness!) but I hope you know it or can guess. It is a tale of
children and of a runaway perambulator and of folk who never quite
grew up, with just a flick of inquiry--a slightest gesture now and
then--toward precio