Boys are not always so funny and witty as they mean to be and think they are. There was nothing really amusing in calling Ned “Miss Nancy,” and asking him what he put on his hands to whiten them, and yet these remarks, and others of the same lofty character, could raise a laugh at any time.
But deep under Johnny’s contempt for Ned, was the thorn of envy. Before Ned came, Johnny had stood first in just one thing. Twice a week the “Scholar’s Companion” class was required to write “sentences”; that is, each boy must choose a word out of the spelling and defining lesson, and work it into a neatly turned sentence of not less than six, or more than ten lines. Johnny liked this; it seemed to him like playing a game, and he had stood at the head of the class for a long time, for it so happened that no other boy in the class shared his feeling about it. But now, Ned went above him nearly every other time, and they changed places so regularly, that this too became a standing joke among the other boys.
Johnny was walking home from school one day with such unnatural deliberation, that Jim Brady, whose stand he was passing without seeing where he was, called out with much pretended anxiety,—
“You’re not sunstruck, or anything, are you, Johnny? I’ve heard that when folks are sunstruck, they don’t recognize their best friends!”
Johnny laughed, but not very heartily.
“I beg your pardon, Jim,” he said, “I didn’t see you, really and truly—I was thinking.”
“All right!” said Jim, cordially, “it’s hard work, thinking is, and sort of takes a fellow’s mind up! I know how it is myself.”
While he was speaking, a little lame boy, ragged, dirty, and totally unattractive-looking, shuffled up, and waited to be noticed.
“Well, Taffy,” said Jim, with a gentleness which Johnny had only seen displayed to his mother and Tiny, before, “did you sell them all?”
