His mother named him Harold, and named him better than she knew. He
was just such a boy as one would expect to see bearing a heroic name.
He had big, faded blue eyes, a nubbin of a chin, wide, wondering ears,
and freckles--such brown blotches of freckles on his face and neck and
hands, such a milky way of them across the bridge of his snub nose,
that the boys called him "Mealy." And Mealy Jones it was to the end.
When his parents called him Harold in the hearing of his playmates,
the boy was ashamed, for he felt that a nickname gave him equal
standing among his fellows. There were times in his life--when he
was alone, recounting his valorous deeds--that Mealy more than half
persuaded himself that he was a real boy. But when he was with
Winfield Pennington, surnamed "Piggy" in the court of Boyville, and
Abraham Lincoln Carpenter, similarly knighted "Old Abe," Mealy saw
that he was only Harold, a weak and unsatisfactory imitation. He was
handicapped in his struggle to be a natural boy by a mother who had
been a "perfect little lady" in her girlhood and who was moulding her
son in the forms that fashioned her. If it were the purpose of this
tale to deal in philosophy, it would be easy to digress and show that
Mealy Jones was a study in heredity; that from his mother's side of
the house he inherited wide, white, starched collars, and from his
father's side, a burning desire to spit through his teeth. But this is
only a simple tale, with no great problem in it, save that of a boy
working out his salvation between a fiendish lust for suspenders
with trousers and a long-termed incarceration in ruffled waists with
despised white china buttons around his waist-band.

No one but Piggy ever knew how Mealy Jones learned to swim; and
Harold's mother doesn't consider Piggy Pennington any one, for the
Penningtons are Methodists and the Joneses are Baptists, and Very
hard-shelled ones, too. However, Mealy Jones did learn to swim