Arthur Stringer

“ Among the last persons to come away was the short man with the white whiskers, who always wore the gold cross on his coat, and then the tall, white-faced woman who always rustled louder than all the others, and of whom the child was more or less afraid. Teddie remembered them all. Then a man with a long black coat and boots that shone very funnily came down the steps walking with a girl in white, with lilac-blossoms and lorgnettes. Teddie had not seen the tall girl in white go in. ”

“ The child, as he grew older, also took a strange delight in watching people pass up and down the Place. He would suppose with himself that some Great Power had ordained that if a man did not pass before he had taken twenty breaths he would have to drop down dead. ”

“ But in his new home the sturdy Teddie's appetite developed the most unexpected proportions, and he was quickly shuffled out into the wide world, where he fell upon evil days and would surely have died, had not a kindly-eyed Scotch widow in Perkins Place taken him in. ”

“ His loneliness, however, did not weigh heavily upon him. He held animated discourse with bits of broken flower-pots, and fell into the habit of telling wonderful stories to the third step in the landing, which had a crack in it, and therefore always listened best. ”

“ Later on he invented a series of games, in which the pieces of sticks were all men and the stones all tigers. If the tigers knocked over the men first throw, that meant they were all eaten up. But if the men fell down across one another, that meant the tigers could n't touch them, and the tigers had to begin all over again and keep eating up until the men were all gone. Tigers, in fact, from the first day Teddie overheard Bud Persons expatiating on their ferocity, had a peculiar fascination for him ”