Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/274

 these fancies of Lonely's become that with due repetitions and elaboration they became almost visualization, as, for instance, his stubborn and unshaken belief—quite destitute of all historical corroboration—that when not yet six years of age he had been taken up in a balloon, and had been roundly scolded by a certain old maid of Cowansburg for breaking her rosebush in alighting.

Yet in those affairs which his pagan tradition designated as matters of honor, Lonely could be an almost morbid literalist. All through his career, both early and late, it is true, he found it woefully hard to shun extravagance. Yet he could hold aloof, with a scrupulosity that was almost overnice, from those deeds and ways which his warped young conscience ordained as wrong. To raid and forage, glibly to identify one's self with any religious denomination that contemplated a picnic-giving, to steal into the circus, to go swimming and fishing on the sly, to put tick-tacks on windows and black pepper on school stoves, to trespass in orchards and to purloin eatables in general,—in fact, to partake at all times of the bounty of nature without too close inquiry into the