ther children of his size,
neatly stacked in six aisles with eight desks to the tier. He did his
best to copy their manners and to reproduce their halting speech and
imperfect grammar. For the first couple of weeks he was not noticed.

The teacher, with forty-eight young new minds to study, gave him his
2.08% of her total time and attention. Jimmy Holden was not a deportment
problem; his answers to the few questions she directed at him were
correct. Therefore he needed less attention and got less; she spent her
time on the loud, the unruly and those who lagged behind in education.

Because his total acquaintance with children of his own age had been
among the slum kids that hung around Jake Caslow's Place, Jimmy found his
new companions an interesting bunch.

He watched them, and he listened to them. He copied them and in two weeks
Jimmy found them pitifully lacking and hopelessly misinformed. They could
not remember at noon what they had been told at ten o'clock. They had
difficulty in reading the simple pages of the First Reader.

But he swallowed his pride and stumbled on and on, mimicking his friends
and remaining generally unnoticed.

If written examinations were the rule in the First Grade, Jimmy would
have been discovered on the first one. But with less than that 2% of the
teacher's time directed at him, Jimmy's run of correct answers did not
attract notice. His boredom and his lack of attention during daydreams
made him seem quite normal.

He began to keep score on his classmates on the fly-leaf of one of his
books. Jimmy was a far harsher judge than the teacher. He marked them
either wrong or right; he gave no credit for trying, or for their
stumbling efforts to express their muddled ideas and incomplete grasp. He
found their games fun at first, but quickly grew bored. When he tried to
introduce a note of strategy they ignored him because they did not
understand. They made rules as they went along and changed them as they
saw fit. Then, instead of complying with their own rules, they pouted-up
and sulked when they couldn't do as they wanted.

But in the end it was Jimmy's lack of experience in acting that tripped
him.

Having kept score on his playmates' answers, Jimmy knew that some fairly
high percentage of answers must inevitably be wrong. So he embarked upon
a program of supplying a certain proportion of errors. He discovered that
supplying a wrong answer that was consistent with the age of his
con