A practical joke he relished infinitely
more than a practical problem, and a good game at pinsticking was far
more entertaining than a language lesson. Moreover, he was always
hungry, and _would_ eat in school before the half-past ten intermission,
thereby losing much good play-time for his voracious appetite.
But there was nothing in natural history that Titee didn't 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. The entire Third District, with its swamps and
canals and commons and railroad sections, and its wondrous, crooked,
tortuous streets was as an open book to Titee. There was not a nook or
corner that he did not know or could 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. He
knew just exactly when it was time for crawfish to be plentiful down in
the Claiborne and Marigny canals; just when a poor, breadless fellow
might get a job in the big bone-yard and fertilizing factory out on the
railroad track; and as for the levee, with its ships and schooners and
sailors--Oh, how he could revel among them! The wondrous ships, the
pretty little schooners, where the foreign-looking sailors lay on long
moon-lit nights, singing gay bar carols to the tinkle of a guitar and
mandolin.
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