To elaborate the tale of how the Pratt girl blundered with Piggy Pennington’s note would be depressing.  For it holds in its barbed meshes a record of one agonizing second in which Piggy saw the folded paper begin to slip and slide down the incline of his Heart’s Desire’s desk, whereon the Pratt girl had dropped it; saw the two girls grab for it; heard it crash from the seat to the floor with what seemed to him a deafening roar.  Nor is this all that the harrowing tale might disclose.  It might dilate upon the horror that wrenched Piggy’s spine as he watched the teacher’s finger crook a signal for the note to be brought forward.  It would be manifestly cruel and clearly unnecessary to describe the forces which impelled the psychic wave of suggestion that inundated the school—­even to the youth of the “B” class, with his head under the desk, looking for a pencil—­and gave every demon there gleeful knowledge that the teacher had nabbed a note and would probably read it aloud.  It is enough to submit the plain, but painful, statement that, when the teacher tapped her pencil for attention, a red ear, a throbbing red ear, flared out from either side of Piggy Pennington’s Fourth Reader, while not far away a pair of pig-tails bristled up with rage and humiliation from a desk where a little girl’s head lay buried in her arms.  Then the teacher unfolded the crackling paper and read this note:—­

FRIEND MARY.—­Did you mean anything by letting Him sing with you.  I dont care if you did but I never don anything to deserve it, but if you dident I am very sorry, will tell you bout it at the partey.  Well that is all I can think of today, from

  Yourse Ever,

  WIN PENNINGTON.

  P.S.  If you still meen what you sed
  about roses red and vilets blue all right
  and so do I. W H P.

[Illustration:  He watched the teacher’s finger crook a signal for the note to be brought forward.]

Piggy waded home through blood that night.  The boys could not resist calling out “Friend Mary” or “Hello, Roses Red,” though each boy knew that his taunt would bring on a fight.  Piggy fought boys who were three classes above him.  He whipped groups of boys of assorted sizes from the lower grades; but the fighting took him away from his trouble, and in most cases he honored his combatants.  He was little the worse for wear when he chased the last swarm of primary urchins into his father’s cow lot, fastened them in, and went at them one by one with a shingle.  A child living next door to the Penningtons had brought the news of Piggy’s disgrace to the neighborhood, and by supper-time Mrs. Pennington knew the worst.  While the son and heir of the house was bringing in his wood and doing his chores about the barn, he felt something in the air about the kitchen which warned him that new tortures awaited him.

[Illustration:  ... fought boys who were three classes above him ... whipped groups of boys of assorted sizes.]