Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Football stories; School sports -- Juvenile fiction; Teenage boys -- Juvenile fiction
At Wyndham you made an arrangement with a citizen of Greek birth
named――well, no one could pronounce his name in its entirety, but you
called him “Poppy,” which was about a quarter of the whole――for your
Sunday paper. “Poppy” delivered it, along with some forty others, at
the entrance. After breakfast――before if you had time――you went and got
it. “Poppy,” however, didn’t attempt to mark each subscriber’s name on
his paper. He merely delivered the required assortment, and let you do
your own selecting. Nine times out of ten you got a paper. Sometimes
it wasn’t the one you had ordered, but it was better than none, and
after you had read it you exchanged with some one else for the one you
preferred. But on the Sunday morning following the Scrub’s glorious
victory over Freeburg High School, a victory he had talked over the
evening before until his throat had become dry, Clif found only two
papers left, one a Boston publication, and the other, boasting not even
a colored supplement, a stingy thing from the state capital.
“I might have known I’d get left if I came down this late,” mourned
Clif. He had tarried upstairs to collect his laundry, and make out
the list, a duty generally put off until later in the morning. He
picked up the Boston paper tentatively, shook his head, and laid it
down again just as its rightful owner appeared, viewing Clif with deep
suspicion. There was plenty of time to go to the village if he could
get permission, and he ascended the stairs again and sought Number 19.
There Mr. McKnight, after politely offering Clif the use of his own New
York _Times_, signed his name to a gray slip of paper and Clif started
for the village.
It was quite warm this morning, much warmer than yesterday, and the sun
turned the yellowing maples and birches to pure gold. The elms along
the drive were already littering the gravel with their rusty brown
leaves. It was a lazy sort of a day, and Clif’s steps, once he was in
the fuller sunlight of Oak Street, grew slower and slower, until he was
fairly dawdling along. He was still dawdling when he crossed Hubbard
Street and passed the Inn, before which several visiting automobiles
were parked. His thoughts went back to a week ago, and his father’s
visit, and the drive to Cotterville, and he was almost to State Street,
beyond which, on the other side of Oak, “Poppy’s” combined fruit,
candy, and news emporium stood, when something claimed his interest,
and brought his thoughts back to the present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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