Last summer there was a lemonade stand under the trees at the house beyond the red brick church. Lemonade was three cents a glass. But there weren't many buyers. The fingers of the small venders were not comfortably clean, and nobody knew if they washed the glasses. By and by it began to rain and four of them scuttled of to the shelter of the big church doorway, leaving only the littlest boy in charge. Along came the fine gentleman, and though he didn't have an umbrella, he stopped in the fast increasing rain to say, "I'll take a glass of lemonade." And he drank it, too. Then he left ten cents and didn't want the change. He never does. Every newsboy in Indianapolis knows that. Among the little folk he meets he scatters pennies as freely as the sunshine of his words.
"You see," he says apologetically to any grown-up who catches him, "pennies are awful hard to get when you're a boy. Why, there isn't anything so hard as pennies. I remember."
Always when he comes home from down-town he brings candy. The children troop to meet him along the route, literally hold him up to go through his pockets, and he lets them. He and children know so well how to get together on a common meeting ground. It's the greatest embarrassment to both for grown people to make the introduction. He doesn't at all enjoy having Mary or Johnny trotted into the parlor in best clothes to recite "Orphant Annie" to him. And he never says, "How do you do, my little man?" or "Can't the pretty little girl give me a kiss?" Never! That wouldn't be Mr. Riley. If he and the children are left to themselves, he will sidle along like another child and say, "Hello! What's your name?" And if this doesn't work, he'll say, pretty soon, "Say, I know a story. Want to hear it?"
Invariably this will bring at least an affirmative nod. In another moment he is rambling delightfully on in the lines of the Raggedy Man or The Runaway Boy or the Bear Story. He is reciting the verses that great audiences would pay good money to hear. The children don't
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