them
and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had
lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at
first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the best advantage
in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care
for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his
self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to
keep house--even above a stable--most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was
rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a
wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a
few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an
album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He
had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on
Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's mother was likely to caution us about
her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my
leaving. I never heard of Raymond's having been there.

But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned
down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"--that was
the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as
inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to
question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an
abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in
all. I never speculated--never asked where they had come from; never
considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's
father may have been paid for driving the two bays and washing the
parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and
not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the
three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself
as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a
more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a
month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the
opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to
a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous
crowd in a big cindered yard.

Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took
occasion, on the stairs, to say:--

"How are you, Johnny?"--

And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:--