with a cry of "Just wait until teacher
fixes you for ducking." A friend called an enthusiastic invitation to
play tops on the smooth street macadam. Silvey stopped to convey the
important information that the "Tigers" were to hold their first fall
football practice in the big lot that afternoon. John promised his
appearance--later. Other and more important matters would claim his
attention for the next half-hour.

At last the new little girl came down the long walk leading from the
school yard to the street and hippity-hopped over the cement sidewalk
towards home, with school books swinging carelessly to and fro in her
strap.

He started after her with the unnecessary and therefore fascinating
stealth of an Indian, for he meant to find out where she lived. As she
left the cross street where the telephone exchange stood, her gait
slackened to a walk--still eastward. Past the little block of stores
which housed a struggling delicatessen, an ambitious, gilt-signed
"elite" tailoring establishment, and a dingy, dirty-windowed little
jewelry shop, across Southern Avenue where gray-eyed Harriette, that
divinity of the preceding year, lived, and still no sign of a change in
direction.

Once she turned and looked backward. John fled, panic-stricken, to the
shelter of the nearest store entrance; for you might be in love with a
girl, you might be obsessed with a desire to find her residence that you
might pass it occasionally and wonder in a dreamy sort of a way what she
might be doing, but the girl herself must never know it. That would be
contrary to every precept of the schoolboy code of ethics.

At last she turned a corner--his home corner--where the drug store
stood, and broke again into a hippity-hop down the shady, linden-lined
street. With heart gloriously a-thump, he watched the door of the big
apartment building at the end of the street close upon the little
white-clad form, and he knew that the van load of furniture which had
been carried in on the Friday preceding belonged to her parents. So he
retraced his steps across the street with a dolorously cheerful whistle
on his lips.

Over the railroad tracks he went as usual to the big, weed-grown,
rubbish-littered field north of the dairy farm, which served as baseball
grounds, athletic field, and football gridiron, according to the season.
There he found a baker's dozen of boys of his own age, who greeted him
joyously.

"Sid DuPree's gone to get his football," Sil