thinking about the different things we’d bring down and put in it.

I said, “I wonder how old it is? It’s a ramshackle old pile of junk, but that makes it all the better, for a scout meeting-place.” Because maybe you don’t know it, but scouts don’t like things to be too civilized, like.

“Maybe it has romance,” Pee-wee said.

He got that word out of the movie play that had the old pirate ship in it. There was something in that play about the old ship being a monument of romance. I had to laugh, because it seemed so funny to talk that way about an old ramshackle railroad car.

“I mean adventures,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I told him; “that car reminds me of an old Spanish Galleon, it’s so different. Maybe some buccaneers used to have their den in it, hey? When I look at that car it reminds me of King Arthur and all those old fellows. You’ve got romances and adventures and things on the brain since you’ve been going down to the Lyric. What’s puzzling me is how we’re going to fix lockers in it for our stuff, and where we’re going to hang our pictures.”

Just then little Alf piped up in that funny way he has and said, “My mother doesn’t believe in adventures.”

“Well,” I said “she’ll never pull much of a stroke with Scout Harris then.”

“They always end by somebody getting dead,” he said.

“Just the same,” Pee-wee shouted, “I bet that old car is fifty years old. I bet if it could talk it would have a tale to tell——”

“A which?” I said.

“How do we know where it has been?” he kept up. “Why can’t a railroad car have a-what-do-you-call it—a romantic past, just the same as a ship or an old house where—maybe where George Washington used to stay? How do we know?”

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“Maybe it’s the very car that George Washington crossed the Delaware in,” I said, just to jolly him along.

“How about an old Indian stage coach?” he piped up.

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