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 teaching school she can’t come home, at least not until it’s time for vacation. If it was vacation and she could come and didn’t come, why, that’d be a horse of a different colour, and there’d be some reason for getting droopy.”

Merely to carry on the conversation, Jamie inquired: “Is Lolly a pretty girl?”

The Scout Master scuffled along the sidewalk, glancing from right to left, dodging pedestrians, watching passing cars for their numbers and direction, and replied en route: “Oh, joy! Maybe you’d call her pretty. If you like taffy molasses hair and big blue eyes and pink cheeks and a baby smile and about as much notion of whether you’re going to do it or whether you ain’t as a wave coming in, why, Lolly’s a pretty girl. But if you ask me, I’d tell you that if you want to see a pretty girl, if you want to see a right royal, high steppin’, cat’s whiskers kind of a girl, just turn your optics loose on Molly!”

“This sounds interesting,” said Jamie. “Can you give me any instructions as to where I’d have to be in order to ‘turn my optics loose on Molly’?”

“No,” said the Scout Master, “not during the school season, I couldn’t. Vacations it’s easy, unless the coming vacation is going to be different from all the vacations that have gone before. All that have gone before Molly comes home, at least part of the time, and then we have picnics and she tramps with us and scouts with us, and we sure do have a real time when Molly’s on the job.”

“Her home is near here?” inquired Jamie, beginning to take interest.