MARK TIDD

CHAPTER I

My name is Martin—James Briggs Martin—but almost everybody calls me Tallow, because once when I was younger I saw old Uncle Ike Bond rubbing tallow on his boots to shine them, and then hurried home and fixed mine up with the stub of a candle and went to school. I guess it couldn’t have smelled very good, for everybody seemed to notice it, even teacher, and she asked me what in the world I’d been getting into. After that all the boys called me Tallow, and always will, I guess.

I tell you about me first only because I’m writing this account of what happened. Mark Tidd is really the fellow I’m writing about, and Mark’s father and mother, and the engine Mr. Tidd was inventing out in his barn, and some other folks who will be told about in their places. I helped some; so did Plunk Smalley and Binney Jenks, but Mark Tidd did most of it. Mark Tidd sounds like a short name, doesn’t it? But it isn’t short at all, for it’s merely what’s left of Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus Tidd, which was what he was christened, mostly out of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a big book that Mr. Tidd was so fond of reading that he never read much of anything else except the papers.

Mark Tidd was the last of us four boys to move to Wicksville. I was born there, and so was Plunk Smalley, but Binney Jenks moved over from Sunfield when he was five. Mark he didn’t come to town until a little over a year ago, and Plunk and me saw him get off the train at the depot. I guess the car must have been glad when he did get off, for he looked like he almost filled it up. Yes, sir, when he came out of the door he had to squeeze to get through. He was the fattest boy I ever saw, or ever expect to see, and the funniest-looking. His head was round and ’most as big as a pretty good-sized pumpkin, and his cheeks were so fat they almost covered up his eyes. The rest of him was as round as his face, and Plunk said one of his legs was as big as all six of Plunk’s and Binney’s and mine put together. I guess it was bigger. When Plunk and me saw him we just rolled over and kicked up our legs and hollered.

“I hope he’s goin’ to live in Wicksville,” says Plunk, “’cause we won’t care then if a circus never comes.”