LITMIR.BIZ

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of authority which the butler somewhat resented. Dinney's heart sank, however, when the man with the brass buttons, "at master's orders," carried away his ragged but beloved old suit, to be incinerated down in the furnace room. Before carrying out those orders, the butler viewed Dinney's tattered raiment with unconcealed disgust. He approached the bundle suspiciously, and carried it at arm's length, significantly holding his nose as he departed.

      Dinney was quick to see the intended insult. A cake of wet soap hit the man with the brass buttons, hit him squarely on the back of the neck. The soap was followed by a volley of blasphemy that was, as the butler afterwards told the chambermaid, "fairly heart-renderin' and too awful for respectable people to talk on!"

      ​When Dinney was led downstairs he was a very changed boy—that is, of course, changed in appearance. His sandy little crop of hair was on end, his face was shiny with much rubbing, and for the first time in history his person was odorous of toilet soap. What troubled him most was that his new pants were very prickly.

      They were patiently waiting for him, and the sad-eyed woman took him on her knee and wept over him for a while. Dinney neither enjoyed nor understood that, but with him it was a law to look meek when in doubt. Yet he felt an indefinite unrest and restraint that was even more painful than the prickly torture of his new pants.

      The sad-eyed woman took it for illness (Dinney was as tough as a pine knot!) and wept over him once more and asked how he would like to be her boy, her very own little boy for all the rest of his life.

      That was a question Dinney had not thought over. But at that moment he heard the rattle of the dinner dishes and caught a whiff of the consommé being brought in, so ​he, being very much in doubt, looked meeker than ever. He next noticed a silver dish on the sideboard piled high with big oranges. The oranges settled the matter. He was hers—hers for all time.

      But he wriggled away, because he did not like being hugged. Such things were strange to him, he had never been taught to look for them, and his heart had never hungered for them. But he kept his eye on the dish of oranges. During all this George coughed once or twice, and said Dinney had the making of a fine boy in him, a very fine boy indeed!

      So Dinney, who had beheld nothing but brick and stone all his life, was carried away into the country. Never before had he seen hot corn, the same as the Italians sold on the street corners, growing on long stalks. Nor had he ever before seen apples hanging on trees, or acres and acres of green grass, or flowers, millions and millions of flowers, all growing wild on the ground, like a lot of cobble-stones. It filled him with a silent wonder.

      ​The little, sad-eyed woman and George talked over Dinney's future, and planned out his life for him, and nudged each other and nodded their heads significantly at each little sign from the child as he gazed out wide-eyed on a new world.

      But at the end of the first day on the farm a change crept over Dinney. He did not romp laughing-eyed across the fields, nor did he gather hands full of flowers, as they had expected, or sit listening to the birds singing in the trees.

      He hung disconsolately about the stables, with his hands in his pockets, asking the coachman endless questions about the polishing of harness and the breeding of horses. He caught and made captive a stray collie pup, and shut it up in one of the empty oat bins, and then chased the ducks for one busy hour. When stopped at this by the gardener, he fell out of an apple-tree or two, and then, wrapped in sudden thought, wondered what Gripsey was doing at home just at that moment. Then he fell to ruminating as to whether or not the evening papers were out, ​and wistfully told the man called George all about "de gang," and the lives they lived and the things they did.

      Then, being unable to fathom his indefinite and unknown unhappiness, he wailed aloud that he was hungry. The sad-eyed woman fed him until she feared he would burst, and said the air was doing him a world of good. Dinney had been used to eating whenever the spirit moved him, and it seemed to him a ridiculous custom to sit down and devour things at stated times, whether you were hungry or not.

      But after his meal his melancholy returned to him. What with the prickliness of his new clothes and his secret desire to indulge in a quiet smoke, he suffered untold agonies.

      In his loneliness and misery he disappeared stableward, and was not seen again until dinner-time.

      The poor little sad-eyed woman was worried to distraction about him. When he shambled back to the house she called him over to her and took him up on her knee, and petted him as few mothers pet even their ​own son. But it was all lost on Dinney. He squirmed and was unhappy.

      "What is it, dear? Are you not well?" she asked, with a real and beautiful tenderness. Dinney was silent.

      "Are you not happy here, dear?" the little woman asked once more, putting all the pent-up love of her childless life in one mother's kiss on the boy's flushed forehead.

      It was too much! Dinney broke loose and sprang away like a young tiger.

      "Gordammit! lee' me alone!" he screamed; "lee' me alone!" His face was contorted with a sort of blind fury. "I'm sick of all dis muggin', an' dis place, an—an everyt'ing else, and I want to go home, see! I want to go home—I want to go home!"

      He wailed it out, over and over again, and the tears streamed down his face.

      "But—but, Dinney, are n't you happy here?"

      "No, I ain't," almost shrieked the child, in a passion of homesickness, "an' I'm tired o' dis bloody place, an' I want to go home—I want to go home!"

      ​To his lifelong shame, Dinney broke down and bawled like any baby in arms.

      The childless mother covered her eyes with her handkerchief and wept silently. The man called George walked nervously up and down the room, and then looked absently out over the fields of ripening wheat, golden in the sunlight of the late afternoon.

      There was silence for several minutes, and then the man said, and it seemed almost resignedly:

      "Very well, Dinney, if you really want to, I'll take you back to the city with me in the morning."

      Could it have been a sob that choked his voice? Dinney neither knew nor cared. He wiped his eyes and seemed to smell once more the smell of the crowded city street, and to hear the music of a thousand hurrying wheels.

      The Fly in the Ointment

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      THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

       Table of Contents

      They seen as we was gutter scum,

      An' they said as we was bad;

       An' they knowed th' soul of a gutter snipe

      Was th' on'y soul we 'ad!

      ​

      THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

      HE was by no means the worst boy in the ward, though the charge was often flung at him. Really bad boys lived all about him, but their ways were not his ways.

      Such being so, there was great rejoicing and glee when he fell. It all came about by the merest accident. He had learned his Golden Text by heart, had his penny for collection in his pocket, and his Sunday-school lesson, about Joseph, at his finger tips. And it might never have happened but that at the corner of the street his quick ears caught a whiff of band music.

      He stopped and listened. Yes, it was most unmistakably a band—no, two, three, four of

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