I don’t know just how Shelley ever got his big illumination that curls was not a curse put on him by his Maker.  But he certainly did get it when he was round twelve.  After two years of finish fights he suddenly found out that curls is optional, or a boy’s own fault, if not his mother’s, and that they may be cured by a simple and painless operation.  He’d come to the observing age.  They say he’d stand in front of Henry Lehman’s barber shop every chance he’d get, watching the happy men getting their hair cut.  And he put two and two together.

Then he went straight to his mother and told her all about his wonderful and beautiful discovery.  He was awful joyous about it.  He said you only had to go to Mr. Lehman’s barber shop with thirty-five cents, and the kind Mr. Lehman would cut the horrible things off and make him look like other boys, so please let him have the thirty-five.

Then Shelley got a great shock.  It was that his mother wanted him to wear them things to please her.  She burst into tears and said the mere thought of her darling being robbed of his crowning glory by that nasty old Henry Lehman or any one else was breaking her heart, and how could he be so cruel as to suggest it?

The poor boy must of been quite a bit puzzled.  Here was a way out of something he had thought was incurable, and now his mother that loved him burst into tears at the thought of it.  So he put it out of his mind.  He couldn’t hurt his mother, and if cutting off his disgrace was going to hurt her he’d have to go on wearing it.

Shelley was getting lanky now, with big joints and calf knees showing below his velvet pants; and he was making great headway, I want to tell you, in what seemed to be his chosen profession of pugilism.  He took to going out of his class, taking on boys two or three years older.  I never had the rare pleasure of seeing him in action, but it was mere lack of enterprise on my part.  Before he found out that curls could be relieved by a barber he had merely took such fights as come to him.  But now he went out of his way looking for ’em, and would start the action himself.

It got so that boys used to travel in bands—­them that had criticized his appearance so he’d hear it—­but he’d lie in wait for stragglers that was left behind by the convoy, and it would be the same old sad story.  You can know what it meant when I tell you that the last year Shelley went to school they say he could come onto the playground with his long yellow curls floating in the breeze, and not a word would be heard from the fifty boys that might be there.

And so it went till he was thirteen.  One succession of fights and a growing collection of words that would of give his fond pastor something to think about.  Of course word of the fights would get to Shelley’s ma from mothers whose little ones he had ravaged, but she just simply didn’t believe it.  You know a woman can really not believe anything she don’t wish to.  You couldn’t tell that lady that her little boy with the angel face and soft voice would attack another boy unless the other boy begun it.  And if the other boy did begin it it was because he envied Shelley his glorious curls.  Arline was certainly an expert in the male psychology, as they call it.