rinned. He walked over among the small boys, who
stopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever play
duck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarrassed
friendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood.
After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boy
as a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care.

The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally one
of them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a
country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how," he said.
"They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up State
all the time."

"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in an aside to me.

"You're a liar," said one of the other boys. "We ain't afraid, are we
Bill?"

"Naw," said Bill.

"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling his fists. "I'll
knock your block off in about a minute."

"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the other.

Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not fight, let's play," he
said. "If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to
learn, boys?"

They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion of
their class, decided in his favor, and assented. Like all men, Old
Hundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severest
critics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed
it on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck, Old Hundred tried
to count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn the
job over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:

"As I went up to Salt Lake
I met a little rattlesnake,
He'd e't so much of jelly cake,
It made his little belly ache."

When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundred
drew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the
rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, a
smiling by-stander. "Hi," he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'."

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hundred.

I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of a
learned _litterateur_ of forty-five, but my speech was drowned in a
derisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable,
and hunted myself out a duck.

After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by those
supernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again to
pick up my duck, after dodging flying