He stopped at the corner, and leaned recklessly against a hydrant.  He looked at the house with a deliberation that amazed himself.  At the same time, as a matter of instinctive caution, he kept his left leg well out toward the side street, so that he might retreat, should the door suddenly open and disclose the seraphic vision.  He consulted his large bull’s-eye silver watch (a capital timekeeper), and found that it was half past three o’clock, and he never knew her to be out before four.

This reflection emboldened him.  “Faint Heart Ne’er Won Fair Lady,” he thought again, and brought back his left leg to an easy position, crossing it with his right one against the hydrant.  Then he feasted, with strange composure, upon the house.

Neither Bog nor a much wiser metaphysician could explain it; but the house, and all around it, seemed to be glorified by the loved one within.  The newly painted door was bright with love; the polished doorplate and bell handle glistened with love.  The name Pillbody looked, somehow, musical and winning, because the owner of that name was the teacher and dear companion of Pet.  The carved stone roses over the door seemed to be truly the emblems of love.  It was a silly notion; but, in Bog’s eyes, love imparted a not unpleasant expression to the grim lions’ faces that looked down from the roof.  But the green window curtains with gold borders were the most significant symbols of love, in his eyes.  Bog felt that curtains of any other color would be wholly out of place in that house.  The patch of a garden, scarcely bigger than a bathroom, in front of the house; the single fir tree that grew up in the middle of it; the black iron railing; the door steps, and the pavement—­all took their share of beatitude from the joy within.  Bog could hear love rustle in the boughs of the young maple, that stood in its long green case like a fancy boot top, at the edge of the sidewalk.

CHAPTER IV.

LEGERDEMAIN.

As Bog was resting against the hydrant, absorbed in this delicious revery, and totally indifferent to the consequences, he was startled by a slight tap on the shoulder.  He turned quickly, and saw—­the man he hated—­the man who pretended (Bog would never admit that it was more than a pretence) to save Pet from the falling boards.

“Well,” said Bog, looking on this man as his mortal enemy, “What do you want of me?” He spoke in the gruff, defiant manner peculiar to children of the city.

The man’s livid face and lead-colored eyes and white teeth all combined in a reassuring smile.  “Nothing,” said he, “my good fellow, but to do an errand.”

“I say, now, who’d you take me for, hey?” answered Bog, shaking his head at the man, and feeling a tremendous desire to knock his shining hat off.

The man looked up and down Bog’s cheap gray suit, and at his neatly polished shoes and his clean slouching cap, and then said: