He had never even been known to open his mouth
and snap at a fly, but the expression of his countenance, if it might be
so called, when he was on the chase, was vicious and determined in the
extreme, and by no means betrayed the purely facetious nature of his
intentions. During school hours he seldom wandered from the immediate
vicinity of the school-house, where he appeared to be waiting for the
children to come out to play. Often have I looked up to see him gazing in
at the windows with a gleam of evil expectancy in his melancholy dun
brown eye.
With the joyful advent of the spring came, also, Tommy's tame owl and
"Happy Moses." Tommy's owl emerged from his winter-quarters, and took up
his daily post of observation on the fence on the shady side of the
school-house. He was blind in one eye, which eye was always open, the
other was always closed. Yet with that one glassy, unblinking orb,
Tommy's owl seemed to me, as I lifted my eyes to the window, to be
reviewing the past with an indifference as calm and all-embracing as that
with which he sent his inexorable gaze into the future; and to take in me
and the passing events of the school-room as a mere speck in his
kaleidoscopic vision of the ages.
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