Violets and Other Tales

								

track. The skies hung lowering and gloomy; the usually quiet street was
more than deserted, it was dismal.
Titee leaned against one of the brown freight cars for protection
against the shrill norther, and warmed his little chapped hands at a
blaze of chips and dry grass. "May be it'll snow," he muttered, casting
a glance at the sky that would have done credit to a practised seaman.
"Then won't I have fun! Ugh, but the wind blows!"
It was Saturday, or Titee would have been in school--the big yellow
school on Marigny Street, where he went every day when its bell boomed
nine o'clock. Went with a run and a joyous whoop,--presumably to
imbibe knowledge, ostensibly to make his teacher's life a burden.
Idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy, she called him, to herself, as day
by day wore on, and Titee improved not, but let his whole class pass him
on its way to a higher grade. A practical joke he relished infinitely
more than a practical problem, and a good game at pinsticking was far
more entertaining than a language lesson. Moreover, he was always
hungry, and would eat in school before the half-past ten intermission,
thereby losing much good play-time for his voracious appetite.
But there was nothing in natural history that Titee didn't know. He
could dissect a butterfly or a mosquito-hawk and describe their parts as
accurately as a spectacled student with a scalpel and microscope could
talk about a cadaver. The entire Third District, with its swamps and
canals and commons and railroad sections, and its wondrous, crooked,
tortuous streets was as an open book to Titee. There was not a nook or
corner that he did not know or could tell of. There was not a bit of
gossip among the gamins, little Creole and Spanish fellows, with dark
skins and lovely eyes like Spaniels, that Titee could not tell of. He
knew just exactly when it was time for crawfish to be plentiful down in
the Claiborne and Marigny canals; just when a poor, breadless fellow
might get a job in the big bone-yard and fertilizing factory out on the
railroad track; and as for the levee, with its ships and schooners and
sailors--Oh, how he could revel among them! The wondrous ships, the
pretty little schooners, where the foreign-looking sailors lay on long
moon-lit nights, singing gay bar carols to the tinkle of a guitar and
mandolin. All these things, and more, could Titee tell of. He had been
down to the Gulf, and out on its treacherous waters through Eads Jetties
on a fishing smack, with some jolly, brown sailors, and could interest
the whole school-room in the "talk lessons," if he chose.
Titee shivered as the wind swept round the freight cars. There isn't
much warmth in a bit of a jersey coat.
"Wish 'twas summer," he murmured, casting another sailor's glance at the
sky. "Don't believe I like snow, it's too wet and cold." And, with a
last parting caress at the little fire he had builded for a minute's