Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/85

 With much secret exercise on a haymow trapeze, much surreptitious sucking of eggs, much punching and thumping of his tender and attenuated young body, and many copious applications of that marvel of boyhood lubrications. Angle-Worm Oil,—manufactured from a bottle of those fish-worms known as "night-crawlers," carefully corked up in water and hung in the sun until the resulting compound, reputed to make the body limber, is certainly odoriferous enough to make the stomach unsettled—with all these cogent agencies, I repeat. Lonely worked over Lionel Clarence, and wrought wonders in the once despised and anæmic Preacher's son.

He taught him how to do the cart-wheel, he taught him his Neeley upper-cut and his Cowansburg "trip," he schooled him in the science of wrestling, and in the arts of frog-spearing, initiated him into the mysteries and delights of the mullein leaf, the dried grapevine, and the throat-scalding Indian tobacco-plant. One memorable day he took him in secret to the upper river swimming hole, and although the water was still disagreeably chilly, he sternly held the Preacher's son's clothing