It was a window to gladden any boy’s heart. Behind the big plate-glass pane were baseball bats of all sorts and prices, masks and protectors, gloves and mitts, balls peeking temptingly forth from their tin-foil wrappers, golf clubs and bags, running shoes and apparel, and many, many other things to send a chap’s hand diving into his pocket. Sam Craig’s hand was already there, jingling the few coins he had with him, while his gaze wandered raptly over the enticing array. Always, though, it returned to the display of catcher’s mitts. He was seventeen, a sturdy, brown-haired youth with a well-tanned face from which dark grey eyes looked untroubledly forth. As he stood there in front of Cummings and Wright’s window his feet were planted apart, his attitude seeming to say: “Here I am and here I stay!” And the resolute expression of his face backed up the assertion of his body, so that, had you for any reason wished to move Sam from in front of that window, it would never have occurred to you to try force. If persuasion failed you’d have let him stay there! You wouldn’t have called Sam handsome, although, judged separately, his features were all good. His nose was straight and short, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth fairly wide and firm, and his chin purposeful. What you might have mistaken for a dimple in the cleft of the chin was in reality only a tiny scar, the result of collision with the point of a newly sharpened pencil caused by a fall on an icy sidewalk many years before. When accounting for that scar Sam was wont to indulge in one of his infrequent jokes. There was, he would tell you, a queer coincidence about it; it had happened in Faber-ary. If, through ignorance of the brand of pencils affected in Amesville, you missed the point of the joke, Sam didn’t explain it. He had evolved that pun all himself, and, not being addicted to airy persiflage, thought rather well of it. Consequently, if you didn’t catch it, Sam thought poorly of your sense of humour and wasted no effort on you. He appreciated jokes when he heard them, but seldom perpetrated one himself. And his appreciation was seldom demonstrative. When others laughed Sam confined himself to a slight lifting of one corner of his mouth and a quizzical expression in his calm grey eyes. When others doubled themselves over and frankly shouted their amusement, Sam merely chuckled.