It was a dark, close, sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown
tied of looking at the triangle of elastic in the teacher's congress boot,
and tired of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end
of a bit of thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it
round his left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing
in prison and playing on a violin with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony
Croft was by general assent counted the laziest boy in the village.
That he was lazy in certain matters merely because he was in
a frenzy of industry to pursue certain others had nothing to do
with the case, of course.
If any one had ever given him a task in which he could
have seen cause working to effect, in which he could have found
by personal experiment a single fact that belonged to him,
his own by divine right of discovery, he would have counted
labor or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and
interrogation point.
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