boomed
nine o'clock, went with a run and a joyous whoop, ostensibly to imbibe
knowledge, really to make his teacher's life a burden.

Idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy, she called him to herself, as day
by day wore on, and Titee improved not, but let his whole class pass
him on its way to a higher grade. A practical joke he relished
infinitely more than a practical problem, and a good game at
pin-sticking was far more entertaining than a language lesson.
Moreover, he was always hungry, and would eat in school before the
half-past ten recess, thereby losing much good playtime for his
voracious appetite.

But there was nothing in natural history that Titee did not know.

He could dissect a butterfly or a mosquito hawk, and describe their
parts as accurately as a spectacled student with a scalpel and
microscope could talk about a cadaver. The entire Third District, with
its swamps and canals and commons and railroad sections, and its
wondrous, crooked, tortuous streets, was an open book to Titee. There
was not a nook or corner that he did not know or could not tell of.
There was not a bit of gossip among the gamins, little Creole and
Spanish fellows, with dark skins and lovely eyes, like spaniels, that
Titee could not tell of. He knew just exactly when it was time for
crawfish to be plentiful down in the Claiborne and Marigny canals; just
when a poor, breadless fellow might get a job in the big bone-yard and
fertilising factory, out on the railroad track; and as for the levee,
with its ships and schooners and sailors, how he could revel in them!
The wondrous ships, the pretty little schooners, where the
foreign-looking sailors lay on long moonlight nights, singing to their
guitars and telling great stories,--all these things and more could
Titee tell of. He had been down to the Gulf, and out on its
treacherous waters through the Eads jetties on a fishing-smack with
some jolly brown sailors, and could interest the whole school-room in
the talk-lessons, if he chose.

Titee shivered as the wind swept round the freight-cars. There isn't
much warmth in a bit of a jersey coat.

"Wish 'twas summer," he murmured, casting another sailor's glance at
the sky. "Don't believe I like snow; it's too wet and cold." And with
a last parting caress at the little fire he had builded for a minute's
warmth, he plunged his hands in his pockets, shut his teeth, and
started manfully on his mission out the railroad track toward the
s