This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
266
LONELY O'MALLEY

clave assembled! Who would have imagined that Piggie Brennan, the hero of a hundred fights, now that he was daily to be taking his life in his hands, had secretly fallen to wearing sundry small gloves and bits of hair-ribbon under his copiously patched merino blouse! And how was the Rector of All Saints to understand the trepidation of his son Lionel Clarence, already destined for the ministry (in his mother's eyes) when three prolonged owl-hoots followed by two low whistles came mysteriously from without the Rectory window of an evening, and turned the pink-tinted quietness of the library into the gloom of a prison for one stifling and rebellious young heart! Or who was to explain to the rotund old Witherspoon, the town constable, just why he was no longer kept busy putting out smudges in vacant lots and bonfires under wharves, and why there were no more Indian massacres on the Common, and no more of those strange circus exhibitions, which had threatened the destruction by fire of not a few of the more commodious barns and stables of Chamboro!

From the day, however, that Captain Lonely O'Malley and Pud Jones first discovered that