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,
ostensibly to imbibe knowledge, really 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 pin-sticking was far more entertaining than a language
lesson. Moreover, he was always hungry, and would eat in school
before the half-past ten recess, thereby losing much good
playtime for his voracious appetite.

But there was nothing in natural history that Titee did not 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 an
open book to Titee. There was not a nook or corner that he did
not know or could not 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