IT OUT, OR VICE VERSA.


By dint of skillful generalship, Timothy gathered his forces on a green
bank just behind the railway depot, cleared away a sufficient number of
tin cans and oyster-shells to make a flat space for the chariot of war,
which had now become simply a cradle, and sat down, with Rags curled up
at his feet, to plan the campaign.

He pushed back the ragged hat from his waving hair, and, clasping his
knees with his hands, gazed thoughtfully at the towering chimneys in the
foreground and the white-winged ships in the distant harbor. There was a
glimpse of something like a man's purpose in the sober eyes; and as the
morning sunlight fell upon his earnest face, the angel in him came to
the surface, and crowded the "boy part" quite out of sight, as it has a
way of doing sometimes with children.

How some father-heart would have throbbed with pride to own him, and how
gladly lifted the too heavy burden from his childish shoulders!

Timothy Jessup, aged ten or eleven, or thereabouts (the records had not
been kept with absolute exactness)--Timothy Jessup, somewhat ragged, all
forlorn, and none too clean at the present moment, was a poet,
philosopher, and lover of the beautiful. The dwellers in Minerva Court
had never discovered the fact; for, although he had lived in that world,
he had most emphatically never been of it. He was a boy of strange
notions, and the vocabulary in which he expressed them was stranger
still; further-more, he had gentle manners, which must have been
indigenous, as they had certainly never been cultivated; and, although
he had been in the way of handling pitch for many a day, it had been