Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camps -- Juvenile fiction; Relay racing -- Juvenile fiction
It may have been because his left stocking was afraid of his scowl that
it always shrank from it, pursuing a downward course, and the act of
pulling up his stocking had become second nature to Pee-wee, so that he
did it instinctively whenever he started or stopped, whether it was
necessary or not.
He traveled in two directions, horizontally and vertically. When he
traveled horizontally he usually went scout pace. And when he went up in
the air (which he did on an average of a hundred times a day) he
traveled by means of his voice, which was of such volume as to strike
terror. With the exception of the inside of his head, the parts of him
which were most crowded to capacity were his pockets. To say that his
brain was like an attic would be doing it an injustice. Rather was it
like a rummage sale or like San Francisco after the earthquake.
There is no word in the English language suitable to describe Pee-wee’s
appetite. Though he carried bananas stuck in his belt like cartridges
and was usually provisioned with innumerable cookies, it cannot be said
that he ate between meals, since his life consisted of one continuous
meal. But he scrupulously observed one intermission from eating and that
was the time spent in sleeping. Ingenious though he was, and full of
inspirations, he had never hit on an idea for sleeping and eating at the
same time.
When Pee-wee stood upon the ground he was exactly four feet and
three-sixteenths of an inch high, but when he went up in the air his
greatness baffles description. When in scout negligee he always wore his
sleeves rolled up which somehow bespoke his terrible combativeness. When
he wore his jacket a score of merit badges were displayed instead of his
bare arms. These were interspersed with campaign and advertising
buttons. Upon the front of his scout hat was a lone button as large as a
fifty-cent piece, advising the beholder to use _Rizeman’s Yeast_.
Perhaps this was the secret of Pee-wee’s going up in the air so readily.
Need I conclude this faithful description by saying that Pee-wee was an
all-around scout of the first class? When he held up his right hand with
the three middle fingers extended, they reminded him of the three
helpings of dessert which he often had at Temple Camp, and he remembered
the twelve good scout laws because they were an even dozen like ten
cents’ worth of licorice jawbreakers.
So there he sat upon the railing of his porch looking over the camping
hints in the scout handbook and eating gum-drops. Suddenly he dropped a
gum-drop, a black one, and as he slid down from the railing in quest of
it in the flower-bed below, his handbook slipped out of his other hand
and fell among the bushes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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