us Hippo 312

ILLUSTRATIONS

They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of
their grief _Frontispiece_

PAGE

Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges 4

"Good gracious!" cried Miss Dabtree with an impetuous
lunge towards the point of attack 78

"Really, Jack, I'm beginning to suspect you're an old
hand." 140

He balanced carefully, stretched out one arm to encircle
an imaginary waist 172

The partner of his arms, escaping, rolled over towards
Tootsie 182

SKIPPY BEDELLE

CHAPTER I

FATE IN A BATHTUB

THERE comes a moment when without warning boy and puppy instantaneously
pass into the consciousness of manhood. With the young canine it comes
with the first deep-throated defiance of the intruder, the instinct that
the wriggling, fawning days are over and that the moment to attack and
accept attack has arrived. With the human puppy the change is more
elusive. To some it comes with the first clinging splendor of long
trousers, to others with the first hopeless love, when at the tragic age
of fifteen the world, fate and the disparity of ages intervene. But
usually this transformation, all in the twinkling of an eye, from the
hungry slouch of boyhood into the stern and brooding adolescence, comes
with the discovery of a controlling idea. Without any apparent cause,
some illuminating purpose descends on the imagination, the future opens,
and in the vision of a future Napoleon, a P. T. Barnum, a millionaire or
a predestined genius the man emerges.

When Skippy Bedelle at the age of fifteen years and three months, in the
warmth of early Spring, rambled across the green stretches to his
appointed rendezvous with Compulsory Bath, he went as a puppy sidles to
an undetermined purpose, with a skipping, broken motion, occasionally
halting for an extra hitch at the long undisciplined trousers. A cap
rode on the straw-colored shock of hair which hung like weeds over the
freckled, sharp nose and the wide and famished mouth. Once the idea
occurred to him to turn a cartwheel, and he promptly landed sprawling on
his back, picked himself up, skipped forward a dozen