Peter Taro, the school’s bad boy, had individualistic ideas about it, however. Peter was too crude, too far down in the social scale, to acquire a sweetheart. Therefore he had a propensity to make light of the tenderest sentiments of others. He would walk on the opposite side of any Lover’s Lane—meaning any village street whereon boy and maid could woo without the horrible possibility of being met by parents or those who would carry tales to parents—and make of himself a general nuisance. On picket fences with a stick he would beat a tom-tom. Or he would carry on loud-voiced conversation with the Romeo in the case on subjects of which the Juliet was ignorant. Being snubbed or rebuked, he sought vengeance in rhyme. His lines apropos of Nathan’s affair ran: “Get your fiddle and feel quite fiddley; —Nathan Forge and Bernice Gridley!” This sort of thing he shouted at the top of his lungs to the perplexity of the neighborhood and the edification of the grown-up world in general. Bernice affected to be furious. So ultimately Nathan had to fight the Taro boy. Which he did—adequately. It was the first fight of Nathan’s career—a “kid-fight” perchance—but no less virile or significant on that account. For like many quiet, peaceable men, when aroused the boy became a fury. Lithe as a cat, nimble as a bantam-weight, he pounded Peter Taro until the blood-smeared youngster fled. Those were days of bliss and nights of heartburn. Vividly the hours come back that we spent before kitchen mirrors, steam-misty with boiling cabbage or wash-water of our homes, tying and retying our “cravats”, plastering down our hair with pilfered bay rum. If we had the front of our hair parted and well pasted down, and the toes of our shoes reasonably shined, we were groomed satisfactorily for hymeneal campaigning. That each of us possessed a hat-lifting cowlick in the rear like the business paraphernalia of a small porcupine and that our heels were eternally yellow with mud were among the happy paradoxes of boyhood. We were as we were when we looked in our mirrors—when we posed for phrenological inventory and profile analysis. And besides, a good soldier in either war or love never looks behind anyhow. II We had followed the two little girls homeward one afternoon, chaffing and mauling each other as we would never have done if they had not been somewhere about to see, when we returned along the Green River in the afterglow. Eventually we threw ourselves down on a knoll. While we idled there, the valley grew hushed and the stars came out. “Say, Nat,” I demanded, “whatcher goin’ to be when you grow up?” “A writer and a poet,” he answered without hesitation.