One very
rarely heard him laugh out loud, and his sturdy, rather fat body was
carried rather gravely, and he walked contemplatively as though he were
thinking something out. He would look at you, too, very earnestly when
you spoke to him, and would wait a little before he answered you, and
then would speak slowly as though he were choosing his words with care.
And yet he was, in spite of these things, really a "jolly little boy."
His "jolliness" was there in point of view, in the astounding interest
he found in anything and everything, in his refusal to be upset by any
sort of thing whatever.
But his really unusual quality was his mixture of stolid English
matter-of-fact with an absolutely unbridled imagination. He would
pursue, day by day, week after week, games, invented games of his own,
that owed nothing, either for their inception or their execution, to any
one else. They had their origin for the most part in stray sentences
that he had overheard from his elders, but they also arose from his own
private and personal experiences--experiences which were as real to him
as going to the dentist or going to the pantomime were to his brothers
and sisters.
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