Violets and Other Tales by Alice Ruth Moore
page 24 of 103 (23%)
page 24 of 103 (23%)
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a glance at the sky that would have done credit to a practised seaman.
"Then _won't_ I have fun! Ugh, but the wind blows!" It was Saturday, or Titee would have been in school--the big yellow school on Marigny Street, where he went every day when its bell boomed nine o'clock. Went with a run and a joyous whoop,--presumably to imbibe knowledge, ostensibly to make his teacher's life a burden. Idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy, she called him, to herself, as day by day wore on, and Titee improved not, but let his whole class pass him on its way to a higher grade. A practical joke he relished infinitely more than a practical problem, and a good game at pinsticking was far more entertaining than a language lesson. Moreover, he was always hungry, and _would_ eat in school before the half-past ten intermission, thereby losing much good play-time for his voracious appetite. But there was nothing in natural history that Titee didn't know. He could dissect a butterfly or a mosquito-hawk and describe their parts as accurately as a spectacled student with a scalpel and microscope could talk about a cadaver. The entire Third District, with its swamps and canals and commons and railroad sections, and its wondrous, crooked, tortuous streets was as an open book to Titee. There was not a nook or corner that he did not know or could tell of. There was not a bit of gossip among the gamins, little Creole and Spanish fellows, with dark skins and lovely eyes like Spaniels, that Titee could not tell of. He knew just exactly when it was time for crawfish to be plentiful down in the Claiborne and Marigny canals; just when a poor, breadless fellow might get a job in the big bone-yard and fertilizing factory out on the railroad track; and as for the levee, with its ships and schooners and sailors--Oh, how he could revel among them! The wondrous ships, the |
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