Excerpt from A Battle and a Boy The children formed in a compact little army until their ranks were broken by people pressing in with sharp questions and scrutiny. Franzl stood for a while on the outskirts of the crowd, un certain of his course. Feeling shy, he looked sul len and defiant, and scowled at everyone whose glance he met, not in the least from ill will, but rather from a vague instinct of self-defence. Nudg ing with a prompt elbow every mortal who by chance, or with intention, nudged him, returning with liberal measure all the amenities of childhood, and the methods by which the unregenerate small boy makes the acquaintance of his peer - grimaces, motiveless blows, inconsequent efforts to trip up and knock down-he listened a while to the others, and heard the old hands among the children glibly boasting what they could do, and where they had been, how they had kept cows and sheep on the hill-slopes, how they could scour and run and dig. Buy me! Buy me! They cried. Shrilly. But it was all rather confusing, and as nobody hap pened to inquire what his Special accomplish ments were, or seemed to desire his services, he gradually withdrew from the greed and turmoil of the market-place, and finally forgot it, devofing his energies to the navigation of chips, for it was really a Splendid brook. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.