Yesterday they were nine for a quarter; to-day
they're ten. Gildersleeve wants a dollar for a setting of eggs, but
he'll let you have the same number of eggs for thirty cents if you'll
wait till he can run a needle into each one. So afraid you'll raise
chickens of your own.
Excited groups gather about rude circles scratched in the mud, and
there is talk of "pureys," and "reals," and "aggies," and "commies,"
and "fen dubs!" There is a rich click about the bulging pockets of
the boys, and every so often in school time something drops on the
floor and rolls noisily across the room. When Miss Daniels asks:
"Who did that?" the boys all look so astonished. Who did what, pray
tell? And when she picks up a marble and inquires: "Whose is this?"
nobody can possibly imagine whose it might be, least of all the boy
whose most highly-prized shooter it is. At this season of the year,
too, there is much serious talk as to the exceeding sinfulness of
"playing for keeps." The little boys, in whose thumbs lingers the
weakness of the arboreal ape, their ancestor, and who "poke" their
marbles, drink in eagerly the doctrine that when you win a marble
you ought to give it back, but the hard-eyed fellows, who can plunk
it every time, sit there and let it go in one ear and out the other,
there being a hole drilled through expressly for the purpose.
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