ONCE IN time, as Art Rowanberry would put it, a boy, the only child of a couple advanced in years, entered the world in the neighborhood of Port William, to be distinguished after his second day by the name of Delinthus Stackpole.
His name did him no harm until he started to school, when some of his fellow boys took too much pleasure in repeating it while pointing at him with their forefingers, but the harm of that he overlooked. For teasing to be effective, the teasee must recognize that he is being teased. The young Delinthus Stackpole recognized no such thing. He went his way, not noticing, smiling evidently at something farther on. He was not teased.
His peers then, of course, undertook to molest him physically, which brought forth another revelation: He was not pushed. He was a mild, good-humored boy, big for his age. He was not over-tall but not short, not fat but wide and thick. The bulk of him may have suggested that he was soft, therefore pushable. But when his peers put their hands on him, they found him to be solid. He had a way of entirely filling up his clothes, sometimes overfilling them, for he grew fast. When the pushers pushed him, and he remained standing on his big feet exactly where he was when they started, only smiling upon them as if bestowing a kind interest in their activities, they permanently shortened his name to Stump.
At the age of fourteen, when he finished the eighth grade and emerged at last from school into the unobstructed world, he was as full-grown as he was going to get, and there was a lot of him.
From a time shortly after he learned to walk, he had served his father as a hand—a third hand, you might say, and sometimes as two extra feet. By the time he was out of school, his father, as he freely confessed, could not get along without him. He could do any of the work his father could do and, by then, more of it. For this was yet another revelation. His peers, who thought because he was
