Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/182

The Loom of Destiny replenished. Suns might shine on it, and winds might blow over it, but morning, noon, and night it remained the same tempting thing of delight, oozy of bottom, and sweet to the touch of shoeless feet.

Each day the boy from the Alley brought his sailboat, made of a shingle, with three rakish masts and a rigging of dirty string, and sailed it adventurously up and down his puddle. With a piece of cord tied to the bowsprit, which was very much on the bias, the boy from the Alley puckered up his childish lips, and up to his ankles in mud, choo-choo-chooed delightedly as he pulled his little boat back and forth from one end of the puddle to the other.

And for two golden weeks this continued. Then, one morning, he found an invader on his property. The stranger was a boy of four, wearing shiny gaiters of tan leather and a black-velvet suit with rows of Glittering Things on it. The intruder was not exactly in the puddle, but he was looking down at it with such happy and longing eyes 170