THE KING OF THE PARK

BY MARSHALL SAUNDERS, AUTHOR OF “BEAUTIFUL JOE,” “CHARLES AND HIS LAMB,” “FOR THE OTHER BOY’S SAKE,” ETC. FOURTH THOUSAND New York: 46 East Fourteenth Street THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY Boston: 100 Purchase Street

Copyright, 1897, By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. Typography by C. J. Peters & Son, Boston. Presswork by Rockwell & Churchill.

I Inscribe This Book TO POLICE-SERGEANT CHARLES WESLEY HEBARD OF THE BACK BAY FENS, AND HIS HUMANE ASSOCIATES, TO MRS. HEBARD, HIS KIND-HEARTED WIFE, AND TO THE PARENTS OF THE DEAR GIRLS AND BOYS WHO PLAY ABOUT THE HOME OF THE WELL-KNOWN KING OF THE PARK.

Marshall Saunders.

CONTENTS.

THE KING OF THE PARK.

CHAPTER I. LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR.

Police Sergeant Hardy stood near the Boylston Street entrance to the Fens, his back toward the hundred and fifteen acres of park land which it was his duty to guard, his good-natured face overspread by a smile, as he watched a young lady taking a bicycle lesson in a secluded walk on his left.

The young lady approached the machine held by her instructor as if it were a horse, then springing nimbly on it, her features became rigid with anxiety as she found that her steed would neither go on nor stand still.

Her heroic grapplings and wrestlings with it, her wild gyrations to and fro in the walk, while her teacher dashed madly after her, were so ludicrous that the sergeant, although he was well used to such spectacles, was obliged to turn away to conceal the broad grin that overspread his countenance.

The next object of his attention was a Gordon setter who was gayly trotting into the park, but who, on catching the sergeant’s eye, at once changed his happy-go-lucky demeanor for a guilty shambling gait.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Ormistead’s dog?” said the sergeant in a stern voice, as he glanced at the animal’s collar. “Where’s your escort?”

The setter immediately prostrated himself on the ground, but his humble attitude was belied by the roguish don’t-care expression of the eyes he rolled up at the guardian of the law.

The sergeant waved his hand at him. “Get home with you. You know you can’t run loose here. What would the ducks and the cats say to you; or rather, what would you say to them?”

The dog was not ready to give in. He extended the tip of a very pink tongue, and meekly licked the tip of the sergeant’s shiny boot.

“No nonsense now,” said the man firmly. “You can’t humbug me, and you understand that as well as a Christian. Run home with you.”

The dog sprang up, resumed his careless air, and trotted calmly from the park by the roadway through which he had come.

The sergeant sauntered on. It was a charming September morning. He met a few pedestrians and many nurses and children. It was yet rather early in the day for the carriage people to be out.

A succession of angry childish shrieks made him suddenly wheel round, and look in the direction from which he had come. Two nurses and two children stood by the stone seats near the group of bronze figures erected to the memory of John Boyle O’Reilly.

The sergeant strolled slowly back to them. One of the nurses bent over a little girl who was sobbing violently, and was stamping her foot at a foreign-looking lad with a pale face, who stood at a little distance from her. His nurse, or attendant, for he was rather too old a child to come entirely under a nursery régime, supported him by her presence, and would have taken his hand in hers if he had not drawn it from her.

“And sure you’ve hurt her this time with your murderin’ Frenchy temper,” exclaimed the little girl’s nurse, looking away from her sobbing charge at the silent boy. “It’s a batein’ you ought to have. Come now, tell us what you were after a-doing to her?”

“He took me by the arm and the leg, and he sweeped the ground with me,” cried the little girl peeping at him from between her fingers.

“Och, the young villain,” interrupted her nurse, “and did you?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, it is true; but afterwards embraced her.”

“By the soul of love, but you’re the queer boy,” responded the nurse warmly; “and it’s the likes of you makes the men that thinks they can drag us women round the earth by the hair of our heads, and then make it up with a—I’m sorry for ye, me dear—Bad luck to ye.”

“Hush now, Bridget,” interposed the second nurse, stepping nearer the boy. “Wait till you hear the rights of this. Tell us now, Master Eugene, what did Virgie do to you?”

The boy’s eyes flashed; but he said quietly enough, “Would you have me a talebearer? What would my grandfather say? Ask the child”—and he pointed to the still sobbing Virgie with as grand an air as if he were really the man that he felt himself to be.

“He h-h-hurt my pealings,” wailed Virgie dismally.

“Your pealings; it’s feelings you mean, rose of my heart,” said her nurse, drawing the child nearer to her. “Tell your good Bridget what you did to the naughty boy.”