Friendship and folly
Maria Louise Pool
eBook
(, May 18, 2014)
There was one large wicker chair on the piazza, and in the chair sat a girl. It was a spacious piazza, the roof of which was supported by gnarled tree-trunks, the bark and the knots carefully preserved so as to look "rustic." The deep eaves drooped in a rustic manner also, and there were trumpet-vines and wistaria, and various other creeping things of the vegetable world, wandering about in a careful carelessness, like the hair of a woman when it is dressed most effectively.The lawn swept down rather steeply and stopped suddenly against a thick stone wall that was covered with ivy.On top of this wall, ruthlessly trampling back and forth on the leaves, was a small boy dressed in the fashion of a member of the navy. His blue pantaloons flapped very widely at the ankles, and were belted about him by a leather belt on which was the word "Vireo," in gilt letters; his brimless cap was tipped perilously on that part of his head where the warm affections used to be located in the days of phrenology. On this cap also appeared the word "Vireo," in gilt. This figure, outlined as it was against the bright blue of the sky, had the effect of not being more than about sixteen inches long. And in truth Leander Ffolliott was very small for his age, which was ten years and five months. He did not feel small, however; his mind might suitably have inhabited a giant's frame, so far as his estimation of himself and the Ffolliott family generally was concerned. But the rest of the family did not always agree with him in this estimation, and at such times of disagreement the boy was given to screaming and kicking until the air round about this summer residence resounded, and seemed actually to crackle and glimmer in sympathy with the mood of Leander.Just now he had stopped in his trampling of the ivy leaves. He was standing with his legs wide apart, and was bending forward somewhat, stirring with a stick something on the top of the wall in front of him. His atom of a face was screwed up, his lips sticking out,