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him down the hall and around a corner and stopped at the first door to the right.
    “Here we are. This is your room. Your teacher is Martha Downes—Miss Downes. She’s a good teacher. Miss Downes, this is Randolph Colfax—Rannie for short.”
    “How do you do, Miss Downes?” Rannie said.
    He looked into a lined, spectacled face, kind but unsmiling.
    “I’ve been expecting you, Rannie,” she said. They shook hands.
    “Your seat is there by the window. Jackie Blaine is on one side of you, Ruthie Greene on the other. Do you know them?”
    “Not yet,” Rannie said.
    The bell rang at this moment and children came tumbling into the halls. Most of the first graders had mothers with them, and some of the little girls cried when their mothers left them. Ruthie was one of these. He leaned toward her.
    “Don’t cry,” he told her. “You’ll have a good time learning things.”
    “I don’t want to learn things,” she sobbed. “I want to go home.”
    “I’ll take you home after school,” he told her. “Unless you came in a bus.”
    She wiped her eyes on the edge of her pink gingham skirt. “I didn’t come in a bus. I walked here with my mother.”
    “Then I’ll walk back with you,” he promised.
    On the whole, however, the day was disappointing. He learned nothing new, since he already knew how to read. He read through his first reader while Miss Downes was explaining letters and their sounds on the blackboard. He enjoyed the half hour of crayon work, for he devised a wheel-driven engine he had been thinking about to set in a dam he was building in the small brook that ran through the half-acre lot behind his home.
    “What is that?” Miss Downes asked, examining it through the lower half of her spectacles.
    “It’s a water-powered engine,” he replied. “I haven’t finished it yet.”
    “What’s the use of it?” she asked.
    “It will keep the fish in the pool on the upper side. See, when they swim down, this wing will stop them.”
    “What if they swim up?” she asked.
    “The wing will help them—like this.”
    She looked at him with shrewd, kind eyes. “You don’t belong here,” she told him.
    “Where do I belong?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said almost sadly. “I doubt anyone will ever know.”
    HE PUT THIS REPLY INTOhis mind as she passed on to the next desk, intending to ask his father what she meant, but the day ended in such turmoil that he never thought of it again. True to his promise, he waited for Ruthie and hand in hand the two of them walked up the street in the direction opposite that of his home. He heard some giggling among the other children but he paid no heed to it. Ruthie, however, seemed disturbed—indeed, almost angry.
    “They’re silly,” she muttered.
    “Then why do you care?” he asked.
    “They think you’re in love with me,” she went on.
    He considered this. “I don’t know what that means.”
    “Because I’m a girl,” she explained.
    “You are a girl,” he said. “That is, you are a girl if you don’t have a penis. My father told me so.”
    “What’s a penis?” she asked, her brown eyes large and innocent.
    “It’s what I have. I’ll show—if you’d like to see it.”
    “I’ve never seen one,” she said with interest.
    They were walking in the shade of one of the huge old elms that lined the street. He paused and, putting down his books, he opened his fly and showed the small limp penis hanging beneath his stomach.
    She was fascinated. “It’s cute,” she said, “so tiny! What do you use it for?”
    “It’s a planter,” he told her, and was about to explain further when she surprised him by pulling up her short skirt.
    “Want to see me?” she asked in all kindness.
    “Yes,” he said. “I haven’t seen a girl.”
    She pulled down her small pants and he knelt in the grass, the better to examine the new sight.
    He saw two soft pale lips, enclosing a pink opening that scarcely showed itself except for a rosy tip,