Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/37

 He was perhaps a trifle more timorous and retiring than most of his classmates, slower to fight, slower to learn, and more given to what Miss Morris called "dazing" over his books; but in all the broad characteristics of his age, he was commonplace and typical. Even in the playground he did nothing to mark himself out among his fellows—except to the eyes of little Mary Morris, whose admiration was so silent that he remained unaware of it. Once he attempted to take an impossibly high jump, went at it in a smiling assurance, and fell over it with amazement. (He explained, then, bruised and tearful, that he had dreamed, the previous night, of jumping the six-foot fence at the back of the yard, and had leaped over it with ease and grace.) Ordinarily, he lacked the desire to shine. He lacked it notably in comparison with Frankie; but then Frankie was growing to be the sort of boy who will not let you pass him on the street—even though he has to run to keep ahead of you—and who sleeps always on his side, with a leg drawn up, in an attitude of climbing caught from the schoolbook illustration of Longfellow's "Excelsior."

At the age of nine, Don was a weedy boy, slope-shouldered, loose-wristed, pale and very shy. He was not strong enough in the arm to enjoy baseball; and he was too weak in the calves to relish "Pump, pump, pull away" or "Hounds and Deer"; and for that reason, he did not join in half the games of the yard and the pavement. He spent his idle hours reading stories of Indians, English boarding-school boys and