Andy the Acrobat | Page 3

spires and steeples of the village. It
flooded highway and meadows with rich yellow light, but Andy,
swinging his school books over his shoulder, walked on with drooping
head and a cheerless heart.
"It's pretty bad, it's just the very worst!" he said with a deep sigh, as he
reached a stile and sat down a-straddle of it.

Andy tossed his books up into the hollow of a familiar oak near at hand.
Then he fell to serious thinking.
His gaze roving over the landscape, lit on the farmhouse of Jabez Dale.
It revived the recent allusion of the old schoolmaster.
"I didn't steal that calf," declared Andy, straightening up indignantly.
"Graham, who boards over at Millville, told us boys how Dale had sold
a cow to a farmer there. He said they took her away from her calf, and
the poor thing refused to eat. She just paced up and down a pasture
fence from morning till night, crying for her calf. We got the calf, and
carried it to its mother. I'll never forget the sight, and I'll never regret it,
either--and what's best, the man who had got the cow was so worked up
over its almost human grief, that he paid Dale for the calf, too, and kept
it."
The memory of the incident brightened up Andy momentarily. Then,
his glance flitting to the distant roof of a small neat cottage in a pretty
grove of cedars, his face fell again. He choked on a great lump in his
throat.
"Ginger!" he whistled dolefully, "how can I ever face the music over
there!"
The cottage was Andy's home, but the thought had no charm or
sweetness for the lone orphan boy whom its roof had grudgingly
sheltered for the past five years.
Once it had belonged to his father. He had died when Andy was ten
years old. Then it had passed into the legal possession of Mr.
Wildwood's half-sister, Miss Lavinia Talcott.
This aunt was Andy's nearest relative. He had lived with her since his
father's death, if it could be called living.
Miss Lavinia's favorite topic was the sure visitation of the sins of the
father upon his children.

She was of a sour, snappy disposition. Her prim boast and pride was
that she was a strict disciplinarian.
To a lad of Andy's free and easy nature, her rules and regulations were
torture and an abomination.
She made him take off his muddy shoes in the woodshed. Woe to him
if he ever brought a splinter of whittling, or a fragment of nutshell, into
the distressingly neat kitchen!
Only one day in the week--Sunday--was Andy allowed the honor of
sitting in the best room.
Then, for six mortal hours his aching limbs were glued to a
straight-backed chair. There, in parlor state, he sat listening to the prim
old maid's reading religious works, or some scientific lecture, or a
dreary dissertation on good behavior.
She never allowed a schoolmate to visit him, even in the well-kept yard.
She restricted his hours of play. And all the time never gave him a
loving word or caress.
On the contrary, many times a week Miss Lavinia administered a
tongue-lashing that suggested perpetual motion.
Mr. Wildwood had been something of an inventor. He had gotten up a
hoisting derrick that was very clever. It brought him some money. This
he sunk in an impossible balloon, crippled himself in the initial voyage
of his airship, and died shortly afterwards of a broken heart.
Andy's mother had died when he was an infant. Thus it was that he fell
into the charge of his unloving aunt.
It seemed that the latter had loaned Mr. Wildwood some money for his
scientific experiments. As repayment, when he died, she took the
cottage and what else was left of the wreck of his former fortune.
Even this she claimed did not pay her up in full, and she made poor

Andy feel all the time that he was eating the bread of charity.
Andy's grandfather had been a famous sailor. Andy had read an old
private account among his father's papers of a momentous voyage his
grandfather had made to the Antarctic circle.
He loved to picture his ancestor among the ship's rigging. He had an
additional enthusiasm in another description of his father's balloon
venture.
Andy wished he had been born to fly. He seemed to have inherited a
sort of natural acrobatic tendency. At ten years of age he was the best
boy runner and jumper in the village.
The first circus he had seen--not with Miss Lavinia's permission--set
Andy fairly wild, and later astonished his playmates with prodigious
feats of walking on a barrel, somersaulting, vaulting with a pole, and
numerous other amateur gymnastic attainments.
For the past month a circus, now