WHEN the angel child returned with her parents to New York, the fond

heart of Jimmie Trescott felt its bruise greatly. For two days he simply

moped, becoming a stranger to all former joys. When his old comrades yelled

invitation, as they swept off on some interesting quest, he replied with

mournful gestures of disillusion.

   He thought often of writing to her, but of course the shame of it made

him pause. Write a letter to a girl? The mere enormity of the idea caused

him shudders. Persons of his quality never wrote letters to girls. Such was

the occupation of mollycoddles and snivellers. He knew that if his

acquaintances and friends found in him evidences of such weakness and

general milkiness, they would fling themselves upon him like so many wolves,

and bait him beyond the borders of sanity.

   However, one day at school, in that time of the morning session when

children of his age were allowed fifteen minutes of play in the

school-grounds, he did not as usual rush forth ferociously to his games.

Commonly he was of the worst hoodlums, preying upon his weaker brethren with

all the cruel disregard of a grown man. On this particular morning he staid

in the school-room, and with his tongue stuck from the corner of his mouth,

and his head twisting in a painful way, he wrote to little Cora, pouring out

to her all the poetry of his hungry soul, as follows: "My dear Cora I love

thee with all my hart oh come bac again, bac, bac gain for I love thee best

of all oh come bac again When the spring come again we'l fly and we'l fly

like a brid."

   As for the last word, he knew under normal circumstances perfectly well

how to spell "bird," but in this case he had transposed two of the letters

through excitement, supreme agitation.

   Nor had this letter been composed without fear and furtive glancing.

There was always a number of children who, for the time, cared more for the

quiet of the school-room than for the tempest of the play-ground, and there

was always that dismal company who were being forcibly deprived of their

recess -- who were being "kept in." More than one curious eye was turned

upon the desperate and lawless Jimmie Trescott suddenly taken to ways of

peace, and as he felt these eyes he flushed guiltily, with felonious glances

from side to side.

   It happened that a certain vigilant little girl had a seat directly

across the aisle from Jimmie's seat, and she had remained in the room during

the intermission, because of her interest in some absurd domestic details

concerning her desk. Parenthetically it might be stated that she was in the

habit of imagining this desk to be a house, and at this time, with an

important little frown, indicative of a proper matron, she was engaged in

dramatizing her ideas of a household.

   But this small Rose Goldege happened to be of a family which numbered few

males. It was, in fact, one of those curious middle-class families that hold

much of their ground, retain most of their position, after all their visible

means of support have been dropped in the grave. It contained now only a

collection of women who existed submissively, defiantly, securely,

mysteriously, in a pretentious and often exasperating virtue. It was often

too triumphantly clear that they were free of bad habits. However, bad

habits is a term here used in a commoner meaning, because it is certainly

true that the principal and indeed solitary joy which entered their lonely

lives was the joy of talking wickedly and busily about their neighbors. It

was all done without dream of its being of the vulgarity of the alleys.

Indeed it was simply a constitutional but not incredible chastity and

honesty expressing itself in its ordinary superior way of the whirling

circles of life, and the vehemence of the criticism was not lessened by a

further infusion of an acid of worldly defeat, worldly suffering, and

worldly hopelessness.

   Out of this family circle had sprung the typical little girl who

discovered Jimmie Trescott agonizingly writing a letter to his sweetheart.

Of course all the children were the most abandoned gossips, but she was

peculiarly adapted to the purpose of making Jimmie miserable over this

particular point. It was her life to sit of evenings about the stove and

hearken to her mother and a lot of spinsters talk of many things. During

these evenings she was never licensed to utter an opinion either one way or

the other way. She was then simply a very little girl sitting open-eyed in

the gloom, and listening to many things which she often interpreted wrongly.

They on their part kept up a kind of a smug-faced pretence of concealing

from her information in detail of the widespread crime, which pretence may

have been more elaborately dangerous than no pretence at all. Thus all her

home-teaching fitted her to recognize at once in Jimmie Trescott's manner

that he was concealing something that would properly interest the world. She

set up a scream. "Oh! Oh! Oh! Jimmie Trescott's writing to his girl! Oh!

Oh!"

   Jimmie cast a miserable glance upon her -- a glance in which hatred

mingled with despair. Through the open window he could hear the boisterous

cries of his friends -- his hoodlum friends -- who would no more understand

the utter poetry of his position than they would understand an ancient

tribal sign-language. His face was set in a truer expression of horror than

any of the romances describe upon the features of a

man flung into a moat, a man shot in the breast with an arrow, a man cleft

in the neck with a battle-axe. He was suppedaneous of the fullest power of

childish pain. His one course was to rush upon her and attempt, by an

impossible means of strangulation, to keep her important news from the

public.

   The teacher, a thoughtful young woman at her desk upon the platform, saw

a little scuffle which informed her that two of her scholars were larking.

She called out sharply. The command penetrated to the middle of an early

world struggle. In Jimmie's age there was no particular scruple in the minds

of the male sex against laying warrior hands upon their weaker sisters. But,

of course, this voice from the throne hindered Jimmie in what might have

been a berserk attack.

   Even the little girl was retarded by the voice, but, without being

unlawful, she managed soon to shy through the door and out upon the

play-ground, yelling, "Oh, Jimmie Trescott's been writing to his girl!"

   The unhappy Jimmie was following as closely as he was allowed by his

knowledge of the decencies to be preserved under the eye of the teacher.

   Jimmie himself was mainly responsible for the scene which ensued on the

play-ground. It is possible that the little girl might have run, shrieking

his infamy, without exciting more than a general but unmilitant interest.

These barbarians were excited only by the actual appearance of human woe; in

that event they cheered and danced. Jimmie made the strategic mistake of

pursuing little Rose, and thus exposed his thin skin to the whole school. He

had in his cowering mind a vision of a hundred children turning from their

play under the maple-trees and speeding toward him over the gravel with

sudden wild taunts. Upon him drove a yelping demoniac mob, to which his

words were futile. He saw in this mob boys that he dimly knew, and his

deadly enemies, and his retainers, and his most intimate friends. The

virulence of his deadly enemy was no greater than the virulence of his

intimate friend. From the outskirts the little informer could be heard still

screaming the news, like a toy parrot with clock work inside of it. It broke

up all sorts of games, not so much because of the mere fact of the

letter-writing, as because the children knew that some sufferer was at the

last point, and, like little blood-fanged wolves, they thronged to the scene

of his destruction. They galloped about him shrilly chanting insults. He

turned from one to another, only to meet with howls. He was baited.

   Then, in one instant, he changed all this with a blow. Bang! The most

pitiless of the boys near him received a punch, fairly and skilfully, which

made him bellow out like a walrus, and then Jimmie laid desperately into the

whole world, striking out frenziedly in all directions. Boys who could

handily whip him, and knew it, backed away from this onslaught. Here was

intention -- serious intention. They themselves were not in frenzy, and

their cooler judgment respected Jimmie's efforts when he ran amuck. They saw

that it really was none of their affair. In the mean time the wretched

little girl who had caused the bloody riot was away, by the fence, weeping

because boys were fighting.

   Jimmie several times hit the wrong boy -- that is to say, he several

times hit a wrong boy hard enough to arouse also in him a spirit of strife.

Jimmie wore a little shirt-waist. It was passing now rapidly into oblivion.

He was sobbing, and there was one blood-stain upon his cheek. The

school-ground sounded like a pine-tree when a hundred crows roost in it at

night.

   Then upon the situation there pealed a brazen bell. It was a bell that

these children obeyed, even as older nations obey the formal law which is

printed in calf-skin. It smote them into some sort of inaction; even Jimmie

was influenced by its potency, although, as a finale, he kicked out lustily

into the legs of an intimate friend who had been one of the foremost in the

torture.

   When they came to form into line for the march into the school-room it

was curious that Jimmie had many admirers. It was not his prowess; it was

the soul he had infused into his gymnastics; and he, still panting, looked

about him with a stern and challenging glare.

   And yet when the long tramping line had entered the school-room his

status had again changed. The other children then began to regard him as a

boy in disrepair, and boys in disrepair were always accosted ominously from

the throne. Jimmie's march toward his seat was a feat. It was composed partly of a most

slinking attempt to dodge the perception of the teacher and partly of pure

braggadocio erected for the benefit of his observant fellow-men.

   The teacher looked carefully down at him. "Jimmie Trescott," she said.

   "Yes'm," he answered, with business-like briskness, which really spelled

out falsity in all its letters.

   "Come up to the desk."

   He rose amid the awe of the entire school-room. When he arrived she said,

   "Jimmie, you've been fighting."

   "Yes'm," he answered. This was not so much an admission of the fact as it

was a concessional answer to anything she might say.

    "Who have you been fighting?" she asked.

   "I dunno, 'm."

   Whereupon the empress blazed out in wrath. "You don't know who you've

been fighting?"

   Jimmie looked at her gloomily. "No, 'm."

   She seemed about to disintegrate to mere flaming fagots of anger. "You

don't know who you've been fighting?" she demanded, blazing. "Well, you stay

in after school until you find out."

   As he returned to his place all the children knew by his vanquished air

that sorrow had fallen upon the house of Trescott. When he took his seat he

saw gloating upon him the satanic black eyes of the little Goldege girl.