None o' your--" "Well, hurry to breakfast, then; it's getting late." Lightly she went, humming a tune, leaving the door of her room open, and the eyes of Penrod, as he donned his jacket, chanced to fall upon her desk, where she had thoughtlessly left a letter--a private missive just begun, and intended solely for the eyes of Mr.Robert Williams, a senior at a far university.
In such a fashion is coincidence the architect of misfortune.

Penrod's class in English composition had been instructed, the previous day, to concoct at home and bring to class on Wednesday morning, "a model letter to a friend on some subject of general interest." Penalty for omission to perform this simple task was definite; whosoever brought no letter would inevitably be "kept in" after school, that afternoon, until the letter was written, and it was precisely a premonition of this misfortune that had prompted Penrod to attempt his experimental moaning upon his father, for, alas! he had equipped himself with no model letter, nor any letter whatever.
In stress of this kind, a boy's creed is that anything is worth a try; but his eye for details is poor.

He sees the future too sweepingly and too much as he would have it seldom providing against inconsistencies of evidence that may damage him.

For instance, there is a well-known case of two brothers who exhibited to their parents, with pathetic confidence, several imported dried herring on a string, as a proof that the afternoon had been spent, not at a forbidden circus, but with hook and line upon the banks of a neighbouring brook.
So with Penrod.

He had vital need of a letter, and there before his eyes, upon Margaret's desk, was apparently the precise thing he needed! From below rose the voice of his mother urging him to the breakfast-table, warning him that he stood in danger of tardiness at school; he was pressed for time, and acted upon an inspiration that failed to prompt him even to read the letter.
Hurriedly he wrote "Dear freind" at the top of the page Margaret had partially filled.