[Illustration: "I never in my world seen how they all makes"] "You liked it all right, all right, didn't you, Teacher?" demanded Patrick. "Liked it!" she echoed. "Why, I was simply delighted." "Und s'prised?" questioned Morris. "I was never more so in all my long, long life," answered Constance Bailey with entire conviction. "A BRAND FROM THE BURNING" "Where did you get him?" said the Principal. "In the back yard of one of those double-deckers down by the river," answered the Truant Officer. "Ain't he the bird!" he added in professional enthusiasm. "I've been chasing him for two or three days. He's just about as easy to handle as an eel, and to-day he bit me as we were coming along. He's a beauty, he is!" "And you say he doesn't speak Yiddish?" queried the Principal. "He don't speak the kind I do," the other answered. "I get on all right with the rest of the folks around here, and I certainly never expected to have trouble rounding up a kid that ain't knee-high to a grasshopper. No, you don't, sonny!" he broke off as his charge was sliding toward the door. "You've got to stay here now and have a nice lady learn you how to read and write and cipher." The boy looked up at his captor with the wide, desperate eyes of an animal at bay, recognizing his helplessness, but determined to bite and fight to the very end. "Will you look at that now?" the Truant Officer exclaimed; "he thinks every one's going to hurt him. That's the way some of those kids feel." "Oh, he'll soon get over that here," the Principal laughed. "I've seen them much wilder on their first appearance. The teachers know how to handle them." Left alone with his new charge, the Principal turned and studied him. The boy was in the corner, his eyes fixed on the closed door, his whole little body tense. His visible clothing consisted of a man's coat, cut short at the sleeves and pinned across the breast. The child was so small that this reached far below his knees, where it was supplemented by ragged stockings and shoes. He was unkempt and dirty, even according to the unexacting East Side's standard. But there was something about the poise of his head and the slow, lithe movements of his body that differentiated him from the ordinary street waif. There was no fear in him--no pleading, no snivelling, nothing but a harsh, almost mature, defiance. "Come here!" said the Principal. At the sound of his voice the child turned and looked at him, and the man found himself returning the cool regard of a pair of violet-blue eyes. Blue eyes picked up in the heart of that dusky neighborhood, where he had learned to expect all children's eyes to be either black or brown! "I wonder what he is, and where he comes from," he sighed, as he rang the bell and summoned the teacher who generally acted as his interpreter. "David Copperfield's poor old friend, Mr. Dick, would find plenty of use for his famous prescription, 'wash him,' if he were in my place."