The little Byrd boy is named Lovelace Peyton for his two grandfathers, and he looks and sounds just like he had come out of a beautiful book; but he doesn’t act accordingly.  He is slim and rosy and dimply, with yellow curls just mopped all over his head, and he has blue eyes the color that the sky is hardly ever; but from what Roxanne says about him I hardly see how he will live to grow up.  He falls in and sits in and down and on and breaks and eats things in the most terrible fashion, and he has all sorts of creeps and crawls in his pocket all of the time.  He pulls bugs and worms apart and tries to put them together again; and he choked the old rooster nearly to death trying to poke down his throat some bread and mud made up into pills.

That is what I ran to help Roxanne about, and the poor old chicken was gaping and gasping terribly.  I held him while she made Lovelace Peyton put his finger down in the bill and pull up the wad he had been trying to push down.

“That old rooster have got rheumatiz, Roxy, and now he’ll die with no pill for it,” said Lovelace, as he worked his dirty little finger down after the mud and bread; but he got it out and the poor old chicken hopped off with all his feathers ruffled up and stretching his neck as if to try it.

“Oh, Lovey, please don’t kill the chickens,” Roxanne said in a tone of real pleading.

“I don’t never kill nothing, Roxy,” he answered indignantly.  “If a thing can’t get well from me doctoring it, it dies ’cause it wants to.  Since Uncle Pomp let me put that mixtry of nice mud and brick dust on his shoe he don’t suffer with his frost-bit heel no more.  He’s going to stop limping next week if I put it on every day.  I’m going to pound another piece of brick right now,” and he went around the house with the darlingest little lope, because he always rides a stick horse, which prances most of the time.

“Oh, isn’t he awful?” said Roxanne; but there was the kind of pride in her voice and the kind of look in her eyes that I would have if I had a little brother like that, even if he was so dirty that he would have to be handled with tongs.

“He’s so awful I wish he was mine,” I answered, and then we both laughed.

I had never thought, leather Louise, that I would have a nice laugh like that with a girl who was only treating me kindly to keep from the sin of spite.  It was hard to believe that Roxanne didn’t really like me when she went on to tell me some of the dreadful funny things Lovelace Peyton does almost every hour.  I forgot about her feeling for me and was laughing at her description of how she came home from school one day and found old Uncle Pompey, who is as black and old as a human being can be and is all the servant Roxanne has to help her, cooking dinner with a piece of newspaper pasted in strips all over his face, which was Lovelace Peyton’s remedy for neuralgia.

But just as I was enjoying myself so as to be almost unconscious I saw Belle and Mamie Sue and Tony Luttrell coming around the corner of the street past the front gate of Byrd Mansion and down toward the cottage.  Nobody knows how hard it is for me to see every nice body my own age pass right by my gate in a procession to see Roxanne when I can’t go, too.