Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/60

 might surprise yourself by solemnly asking his advice about mole-traps and the best way of getting rid of the striped cucumber-bug.

So to the bitter end, you see, Lonely O'Malley must remain a very incongruous muddle-up, a contradictory, evasive, ordinary, mortal boy,—a little more sinewy about the shoulders, a little wilder and less learnedly ignorant, a little more artful and inventive, than may have been many of his kind; but still made up of that ancient and eternal mixture of good and bad which makes one boy so like another.

Sorrow could not lie long on that restless, hunched-up shoulder of Lonely's; and as his first long Saturday morning in Chamboro wore away, his earlier sense of misery went with it. He had just gone through his complete repertoire of animal sounds, a performance of untiring delight to the gurgling Alaska Alice, when he became suddenly aware of an uninvited auditor in a red dress. This auditor took the form of a pair of very yellow braids, a pair of very pink cheeks, and a pair of very blue eyes peering in at him through the fence-pickets.