"I'm a teacher as was here," the stranger said. "You needn't be scared of me, kiddo."

"I was just kind of looking around," Pee-wee explained apologetically.

"Here's a pencil fur yer," the stranger said. "I jes' picked it up."

Pee-wee accepted this as a flag of truce, and felt somewhat reassured. A man who would give him a pencil surely meant no harm. He had as much right to be there as Pee-wee had.

"If you were a teacher here I shouldn't think you'd say 'as was,'" Pee-wee ventured, "But gee whiz," he added, "I don't care how you say it." No teacher had ever before called him kiddo and he rather liked it. "Maybe you taught manual training, hey?" Pee-wee said. "Because they're kind of different."

"There's where you hit it," said the stranger.

"Manual training?"

"Right the first time, and I'm just sort of collecting some of my junk."

"That's one thing about me, I'm good at guessing," Pee-wee said. "I kinder knew you were that. Manual training, that's my favorite study because it isn't a study at all. I made a bird-house, I did, in manual training, a dandy big one."

"Bird-houses is a good thing to make," said the manual training teacher.