And with the fear and trembling that all girls have the right to feel of “squirms” both Roxanne and I sat petrified while Lovelace Peyton came around the house at full gallop and drew up in front of us on the brick walk.  His face was streaked with mud, and in one hand he held an old tomato can and in another a dangerous-looking pointed stick.

Lovelace Peyton is freckled and snub-nosed and patched in various unexpected places and his eyes were sweet like Roxanne’s as they flared with excitement when he paused for breath before he unfolded his tale of the adventure from which he had just arrived.

“Guess what crawl I have founded now, Roxy?” he demanded with confidence that sympathy would be extended him over his good-fortune.

“I can’t guess, Lovey, but please don’t let it out,” answered Roxanne with the expected sympathy slightly tinged with entreaty in her voice.  I moved down one step so as to be nearer the capture, for Lovelace Peyton’s enthusiasm was contagious.

“It’s a chicken sk-snake,” he proclaimed proudly; and while both Roxanne and I tucked our feet up under our skirts and squealed, he drew with triumph a very fat, red fishing-worm out of the can and displayed it, hanging across one of his chubby fingers.  “It’s a lovely chicken-eating sk-snake,” he said with breathless admiration.

“Y-e-s,” I said doubtfully.  “But it couldn’t eat a chicken very well, could it, Lovelace Peyton?” I asked politely, with my doubts of the helpless red string hanging on his finger well under control.  Roxanne had gone back to her darning with relief plainly written all over her face.

“This sk-snake could eat up five chickens or maybe more if you give him time,” defended his captor warmly.

“It—­it looks rather small to be so savage, Lovey,” argued Roxanne mildly as she went on darning.

“It’s sick some—­wait till I put it in pepper tea,” said Lovelace Peyton as he lifted the worm.

“Ask Uncle Pomp what he thinks,” advised Roxanne, hoping to get rid of the squirm.

“I bet Uncle Pomp will be skeered to death of him,” answered the proud hunter as he took his departure around the house.

“Oh,” sighed Roxy, “some day he will find a real snake and then what will I do?”

“That is just what I was talking about, Roxanne,” I said, returning to my subject, which is the way my slow, methodical mind works in direct contrast to Roxanne’s way of forgetting one thing because of enthusiastic interest in the next.  “I don’t see how you attend to all of this, this—­” I paused to find a name for Roxanne’s tumultuous household.

“Menagerie,” Roxanne suggested, with a laugh that floated out over the bed of ragged red chrysanthemums as sweet and clear as the note of the cardinal in the tall elm by the gate.

“It’s how you get your lessons and stay high up in your class I don’t understand,” I answered, still using my compliment tactics.  “I’ve only known you less than a month, so it might be just luck that you got first mention for your character sketch of Hawthorne in the rhetoric class; but Tony says you always get it.  You recite your German poems like they were English, and you feel them as much as you do Cassabianca.  When do you study?”