The "Tigers."
John dropped behind to talk to the elder Harrison boy as the team sauntered noisily homeward. He wanted to learn the details of the accommodating illness. Albert chuckled.
"Nothing the matter. Only the school doctor thought there was."
That official was a recent acquisition to the school personnel whose duties, according to the school board's orders, were to "Make daily visits, morning and afternoon, to examine all cases of suspected illness, and prescribe, if poverty makes it necessary, that epidemics be safeguarded against."
"What do you mean?" asked John.
"Well, my throat felt funny and I told Miss Brown. She sent me up to the office to see him. 'Stay home a day, my boy, until we see if it gets worse,'" Albert quoted. "Was I glad?"
So that was what the new school doctor did. Thumped you around and looked down your throat and prescribed a day's holiday as a cure. He wished he'd been Albert. He'd a' stayed on the pier all morning and hooked the big carp again. Some folks seemed to be born lucky, anyway. Couldn't he fall sick too, not badly enough to go to bed, but just nicely sick as Al was?