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open to what seemed to be a book report. What I saw registered shock that dried my mouth. Cyril Pettishanks, born for Harvard, the First National Bank, and beyond, had flunked his fifth-grade book report. His handwriting was no better than a first-grader’s.
    Apply yourself, boy!
the teacher had written over the failing grade. It gave me the spiny all-overs.
    The next Monday it was only a matter of time before Cyril was waist deep in the quagmire of the poem. He had particular trouble with
    If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
      If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
      And treat those two impostors just the same . . .
    Which he got sort of sideways with “if you can be the master of your dreams” and “greet those two impostors.”
    “It’s ‘meet with,’ not ‘meet
up
with,’ Cyril,” corrected Aunt Carmen. “And it’s
treat,
not
greet
!” Cyril rocked the wing chair so hard it fell over sideways.
    More patient than his sister, Betsy, Cyril reversed and started over and over and over again without complaint. He stood on one foot and then the other. He put his hands in his pockets, which made Aunt Carmen tell him to get his hands out of his pockets because Rudyard Kipling was an English gentleman in the jungle and English gentlemen never put their hands in their pockets when they were in the jungle. “Project your voice. Don’t mumble, Cyril,” she prompted. “Start at ‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings.’”
    I would have felt sorry for Cyril if it hadn’t been that he owned my trains out of no fault of mine or virtue of his. Once again I went to the bathroom. I opened the door and closed it firmly as Cyril stumbled, saying, “If you can heap up all your winnings.”
    This time I flew through the kitchen and found the door to the basement. I flicked on the overhead light and dashed downstairs. Three entire suits of armor stood under the stairs; piles of furniture and numerous tarnished silver tea sets crammed the corners, but no trains. Along the wall, hundreds of old
National Geographic
s had been stowed in sloppy stacks. There was a dressmaker’s dummy tangled in the antlers of an enormous moose, but no sign of my trains, or even the boxes that might have contained them.
    It was two weeks before Christmas that I had a chance to try the Pettishankses’ attic. I waited for Cyril to bungle “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch,” which he changed to “If you can talk to crowds and keep on talking.”
    “‘Keep your virtue’! Cyril, not ‘keep
on talking
.’ Begin again, please,” said Aunt Carmen.
    I crept upstairs to the attic. Nothing in the attic but summer clothing in mothballed bags hanging everywhere. No trains. Where were they?
    Downstairs, Cyril was having a particularly sticky time. I crept back into my homework position at the dining table. Today he only had gotten as far as “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew,” which he kept fouling up as “heart and
soul
and
sinew
.”
    “‘Heart and nerve and sinew,’ Cyril.
Nerve,
not
soul
. Start again with the beginning of that verse,” said Aunt Carmen.
    Cyril did it again. Again he said “heart and soul.”
    Mr. Pettishanks, Macanudo in hand, suddenly strolled into the room. He clipped off the tip of the cigar with a silver instrument from his pocket, lit it, and blew a long tail of azure smoke into the room.
    “How are you doing, son?” he asked. “Have you got the Kipling poem by heart? Shouldn’t take long! When I was your age, I used to memorize thirty lines of Shakespeare a night!”
    I stopped in the middle of my history homework. Even Willa Sue went quiet and put her dolls down.
    “Let’s hear it, son,” ordered Cyril’s father. “And tuck in that shirt!”
    Cyril began to sweat in great flowing beads. His ruddy face retreated to the color of unbaked