ou know my name's Penrod Schofield," hissed the boy. He
protruded his underlip ferociously, scowled, and thrust forward his head
until his nose touched the dog's. "And you better look out when Penrod
Schofield's around, or you'll get in big trouble! YOU UNDERSTAN' THAT,
'BO?"

The next day, and the next, the increasing change in Penrod puzzled and
distressed his family, who had no idea of its source.

How might they guess that hero-worship takes such forms? They were
vaguely conscious that a rather shabby boy, not of the neighbourhood,
came to "play" with Penrod several times; but they failed to connect
this circumstance with the peculiar behaviour of the son of the house,
whose ideals (his father remarked) seemed to have suddenly become
identical with those of Gyp the Blood.

Meanwhile, for Penrod himself, "life had taken on new meaning, new
richness." He had become a fighting man--in conversation at least. "Do
you want to know how I do when they try to slip up on me from behind?"
he asked Della. And he enacted for her unappreciative eye a scene of
fistic manoeuvres wherein he held an imaginary antagonist helpless in a
net of stratagems.

Frequently, when he was alone, he would outwit, and pummel this same
enemy, and, after a cunning feint, land a dolorous stroke full upon a
face of air. "There! I guess you'll know better next time. That's the
way we do up at the Third!"

Sometimes, in solitary pantomime, he encountered more than one opponent
at a time, for numbers were apt to come upon him treacherously,
especially at a little after his rising hour, when he might be caught at
a disadvantage--perhaps standing on one leg to encase the other in his
knickerbockers. Like lightning, he would hurl the trapping garment from
him, and, ducking and pivoting, deal great sweeping blows among the
circle of sneaking devils. (That was how he broke the clock in his
bedroom.) And while these battles were occupying his attention, it was
a waste of voice to call him to breakfast, though if his mother, losing
patience, came to his room, she would find him seated on the bed pulling
at a stocking. "Well, ain't I coming fast as I CAN?"

At the table and about the house generally he was bumptious, loud with
fatuous misinformation, and assumed a domineering tone, which neither
satire nor reproof seemed able to reduce: but it was among his own
intimates that his new superiority was most outrageous. He twisted the
fingers and squeezed the