to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking.  Surely, History does repeat itself.  I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day.  For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon.  She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do “pretties” with her lips as she talked—­almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from her boot tops.  This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however.  I myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me.  Her face was so little menacing that I called her “Miss Katharine” on the spot.  But my business was with the child.

“Lucy,” I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, “there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you’re not watching him—­you catch him at it—­but he never comes near you.  He acts as if he were afraid of you.  He is an awkward, stupid boy.  If he gets up to recite about geography, or about ’a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,’ or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace.  And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he’d like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood.”

“He has nice hair,” said my woman child.

“Oh, he has! Very well; does his name happen to be ‘Horsehead’ or anything like that—­the name the boys call him by, you know?”

“Fatty—­Fatty Budlow, if that’s the one you mean.  Do you know him, Uncle Maje?”

“Better than any boy in the world!  Haven’t I been telling you about him?”

“Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket.”

“He meant to give it to you, really—­he bought it for you—­but he couldn’t when the time came.”

“Oh, did he tell you?”

“It wasn’t necessary for him to tell me.  I know that boy, I tell you, through and through.  Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then—­be sociable with him—­not enough to hurt, of course?  You don’t know how he’d appreciate the least kindness.  He might remember it all his life.”

“I might pat his hair—­he has such nice hair—­if he wouldn’t know it—­but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer—­”

“Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless.  Couldn’t you even ask him to write in your autograph album?”

“Y-e-s—­I could, only he’d be sure to write something funny like ’In Memory’s wood-box let me be a stick.’  He always does write something witty, and I don’t much care for ridiculous things in my album; I’m being careful with it.”