grown-up outsider might have wondered at such a friendship, for Harold
Jones was a pale, thin youth, with a squeaky voice. His skimmed-milk
eyes popped out over a waste of freckles which blurred his features
and literally weighted down a weak, loosely-wired jaw and kept an
astonished mouth opened for hours at a time. Piggy, on the other hand,
was a sturdy, chunky, blue-eyed boy, who had fought his way up to
glory in the school, and who had run and jumped, and tumbled and
dived, and bantered himself into the right to be King of Boyville.
Chummery between the two boys seemed impossible, yet it was one of the
things which every school expects in a certain crisis. When the affair
is reversed, the two little girls go about breathing undying
hatred for one another. But a boy begins to consume his rival with
politeness, to seek him out from all other beings on earth, to study
his tastes and cater to his humors. And so, while the comradeship
between Piggy Pennington and Mealy Jones was built on ashes, its
growth was beautiful to see.

[Illustration: _Harold Jones_]

[Illustration: _To study his tastes_.]

[Illustration: ... _the comradeship ... was beautiful to see_]

In all their hours of close communion neither boy mentioned to the
other the name of the little girl in the red shawl and the paint-brush
pig-tails whose fitful fancy had brought on all his trouble. In some
mysterious way each managed to shower her with picture cards, to
compass her about with oranges, to embower her desk with flowers;
but it was all done in stealth, and she who was the object of
this devotion rewarded it openly and--alas for the vanity of her