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Updated: May 3, 2025
And the next day Titee was tardy again, and lunchless too, and the next, until the teacher, in despair, sent a nicely printed note to his mother about him, which might have done some good, had not Titee taken great pains to tear it up on the way home. One day it rained, whole bucketsful of water, that poured in torrents from a miserable, angry sky.
It was late when Titee came home, to such a home as it was, and he had but illy performed his errand; so his mother beat him and sent him to bed supperless. A sharp strap stings in cold weather, and a long walk in the teeth of a biting wind creates a keen appetite.
It was not exactly dark, though in this part of the city there is neither gas nor electricity, and on such a night as this neither moon nor stars dared show their faces in so gray a sky; but a sort of all-diffused luminosity was in the air, as though the sea of atmosphere was charged with an ethereal phosphorescence. Search as they did, there were no signs of Titee.
"No, no, it's my old man. He's hungry," sobbed Titee, holding out a little package. It was the remnants of his dinner, all wet and rain-washed. "What old man?" asked the big brother. "My old man. Oh, please, please don't go home till I see him. I'm not hurting much, I can go."
The entire Third District, with its swamps and canals and commons and railroad sections, and its wondrous, crooked, tortuous streets, was an open book to Titee. There was not a nook or corner that he did not know or could not 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.
But if Titee cried himself to sleep that night, he was up bright and early next morning, had been to mass, devoutly kneeling on the cold floor, blowing his fingers to keep them warm, and was home almost before the rest of the family were awake.
Moreover, he was always hungry, and would eat in school before the half-past ten recess, thereby losing much good playtime for his voracious appetite. But there was nothing in natural history that Titee did not 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.
After a while they found a pitiful little heap of sodden rags, lying at the foot of a mound of earth and stones thrown upon the side of the track. It was Titee with a broken leg, all wet and miserable and moaning. They picked him up tenderly, and started to carry him home. But he cried and clung to the mother, and begged not to go. "Ah, mon pauvre enfant, he has the fever!" wailed the mother.
You don't ever have nothin' to eat." "I didn't eat to-day," said Titee, blazing up. "You did!" "I tell you I didn't!" and Titee's hard little fist planted a punctuation mark on his comrade's eye. A fight in the schoolyard! Poor Titee was in disgrace again.
There is but one thing to do, walk in. This they did, and holding up the lantern, beheld a weird sight. On a bed of straw and paper in one corner lay a withered, wizened, white-bearded old man with wide eyes staring at the unaccustomed light. In the other corner was an equally dilapidated cow. "It's my old man!" cried Titee, joyfully.
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