dull sometimes.

CHAPTER VIII SCHOOL

Next morning, when he had once more resumed the dreadful burden of
education, it seemed infinitely duller. And yet what pleasanter sight
is there than a schoolroom well filled with children of those sprouting
years just before the 'teens? The casual visitor, gazing from the
teacher's platform upon these busy little heads, needs only a blunted
memory to experience the most agreeable and exhilarating sensations.
Still, for the greater part, the children are unconscious of the
happiness of their condition; for nothing is more pathetically true than
that we "never know when we are well off." The boys in a public school
are less aware of their happy state than are the girls; and of all the
boys in his room, probably Penrod himself had the least appreciation of
his felicity.

He sat staring at an open page of a textbook, but not studying; not even
reading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eye
was shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve,
flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed page
upon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doing
something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished
except by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he was
doing really nothing at all. He was merely a state of being.

From the street a sound stole in through the open window, and abhorring
Nature began to fill the vacuum called Penrod Schofield; for the sound
was the spring song of a mouth-organ, coming down the sidewalk. The
windows were intentionally above the level of the eyes of the seated
pupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, painted for
him by a quality in the runs and trills, partaking of the oboe, of the
calliope, and of cats in anguish; an excruciating sweetness obtained
only by the wallowing, walloping yellow-pink palm of a hand whose back
was Congo black and shiny. The music came down the street and passed
beneath the window, accompanied by the care-free shuffling of a pair of
old shoes scuffing syncopations on the cement sidewalk. It passed into
the distance; became faint and blurred; was gone. Emotion stirred in
Penrod a great and poignant desire, but (perhaps fortunately) no fairy
godmother made her appearance.

Otherwise Penrod would have gone down the street in a black skin,
playing the mouth-organ, and an unprepared coloured youth would