Jimmie several times hit the wrong boy--that is to say, he several times hit a wrong boy hard enough to arouse also in him a spirit of strife. Jimmie wore a little shirt-waist. It was passing now rapidly into oblivion. He was sobbing, and there was one blood stain upon his cheek. The school-ground sounded like a pinetree when a hundred crows roost in it at night. Then upon the situation there pealed a brazen bell. It was a bell that these children obeyed, even as older nations obey the formal law which is printed in calf-skin. It smote them into some sort of inaction; even Jimmie was influenced by its potency, although, as a finale, he kicked out lustily into the legs of an intimate friend who had been one of the foremost in the torture. When they came to form into line for the march into the school-room it was curious that Jimmie had many admirers. It was not his prowess; it was the soul he had infused into his gymnastics; and he, still panting, looked about him with a stern and challenging glare. And yet when the long tramping line had entered the school-room his status had again changed. The other children then began to regard him as a boy in disrepair, and boys in disrepair were always accosted ominously from the throne. Jimmie's march towards his seat was a feat. It was composed partly of a most slinking attempt to dodge the perception of the teacher and partly of pure braggadocio erected for the benefit of his observant fellow-men. The teacher looked carefully down at him. "Jimmie Trescott," she said. "Yes'm," he answered, with businesslike briskness, which really spelled out falsity in all its letters. "Come up to the desk." He rose amid the awe of the entire school-room. When he arrived she said, "Jimmie, you've been fighting." "Yes'm," he answered. This was not so much an admission of the fact as it was a concessional answer to anything she might say. "Who have you been fighting?" she asked. "I dunno', 'm." Whereupon the empress blazed out in wrath. "You don't know who you've been fighting?" Jimmie looked at her gloomily. "No, 'm." She seemed about to disintegrate to mere flaming fagots of anger. "You don't know who you've been fighting?" she demanded, blazing. "Well, you stay in after school until you find out." As he returned to his place all the children knew by his vanquished air that sorrow had fallen upon the house of Trescott. When he took his seat he saw gloating upon him the satanic black eyes of the little Goldege girl. IV "SHOWIN' OFF"