And all the wretched while, if a boy sets foot out of doors, he must be harassed about his overcoat and rubbers; he is warned against tracking up the plastic lawn and sharply advised to stay inside the house.

Saturday might as well be Sunday.
Thus the season.

Penrod had sought all possible means to pass the time.
A full half-hour of vehement yodelling in the Williams' yard had failed to bring forth comrade Sam; and at last a coloured woman had opened a window to inform Penrod that her intellect was being unseated by his vocalizations, which surpassed in unpleasantness, she claimed, every sound in her previous experience and, for the sake of definiteness, she stated her age to be fifty-three years and four months.

She added that all members of the Williams family had gone out of town to attend the funeral of a relative, but she wished that they might have remained to attend Penrod's, which she confidently predicted as imminent if the neighbourhood followed its natural impulse.
Penrod listened for a time, but departed before the conclusion of the oration.

He sought other comrades, with no success; he even went to the length of yodelling in the yard of that best of boys, Georgie Bassett.
Here was failure again, for Georgie signalled to him, through a closed window, that a closeting with dramatic literature was preferable to the society of a playmate; and the book that Georgie exhibited was openly labelled, "300 Choice Declamations." Georgie also managed to convey another reason for his refusal of Penrod's companionship, the visitor being conversant with lip-reading through his studies at the "movies." "TOO MUDDY!" Penrod went home.
"Well," Mrs.Schofield said, having almost exhausted a mother's powers of suggestion, "well, why don't you give Duke a bath ?" She was that far depleted when Penrod came to her the third time.
Mothers' suggestions are wonderful for little children but sometimes lack lustre when a boy approaches twelve an age to which the ideas of a Swede farm-hand would usually prove more congenial.