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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Mischievous enough, you find them, probably, but amenable there it is, amenable but this lad" Mr. Cradlebow paused again, shaking his head with a meaning to which he gravely declined further expression. "What is your name?" I inquired of the little boy, hopefully. "Simmy B.," he answered revengefully in a tone of alarming hoarseness.
"It had been weary work living on the heights, and what had it all amounted to?" I asked myself, with a recklessness too tranquil, now, to be converted into bitterness. "It was so much easier and safer, lower down." But while I doubted and almost gave up the struggle, the Cradlebow aspired ever to greater faith and hope in life, and enthusiasm for life's work.
"Ahem, certainly, " responded Lovell, smiling in vague sympathy with the laughing group. "I call them so, certainly, I do." Only George Olver turned a sober, reassuring face to the blushing Cradlebow. "Give us a tune, Lutie," said he. "Lord, I'd laugh if I could get the music out o' them strings that you can."
"Such colds as that boy has!" exclaimed the paternal Cradlebow. "They're like all the rest of him they're phenomenal. There are times when that boy appears to be nothing but one frightful, perambulating cold! Well," he sighed, "and yet it's a strange fact, that the more depraved and miserable a little devil is, the more his mother'll coddle him.
"Let him alone," said George Olver, but the group had already vanished through the door, Lovell following mechanically. "That's Lute Cradlebow fiddlin' out thar'," George Olver explained to me. "I don't want 'em to skeer him off, for it ain't every night Lute takes kindly to his fiddle. There's times he won't touch it for days and days.
"We found it in the breast-pocket of his coat, teacher," he said. "The coat lay in the bottom o' the boat, and was soaked with brine. It had your name on't." When I unfolded it, it was the little star-fish the Cradlebow had showed me, days before, still folded close in its delicate vine wreath.
"And Lute Cradlebow, Grandma?" I said; "what did she mean about him?" "Oh, she just meant boys will be boys, that's all especially big ones but thar'! I've known 'em to get over it a hundred times and not hurt 'em none. If you're always lookin' at human natur' on the dark side, it seems kind o' desp'rit. My first husband, he wasn't a fretful man, but he was always viewin' the dark side o' things.
It was not a boy's strength in the quivering frame and tense, drawn muscles. In his rare passions I admired Lute Cradlebow. The greater meekness and patience which always followed, I attributed to a lack of perseverance or a too easy abandonment of purpose.
But, for the Cradlebow; his bright dream of seeking his fortune over wide seas and in distant lands, his dreadless enthusiasm in the belief that he should find so much waiting for him in that unsounded world, his determination, above all, to acquit himself truthfully and bravely all these made him, to my mind, ever an object of more inspiring and romantic interest.
One morning, having inured myself to extreme worldliness of soul and begun a deliberately reckless response to the fisherman's letter, I looked out through my window to see the Cradlebow trudging manfully down the lane, with a grotesquely antiquated portmanteau in his hand, and the general air of one who has started a-foot on a journey.
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