noon
Now we will go home and get acquainted . '' `` Well , pa , '' said I , looking him straight in the eye , `` where are we going next ? '' The Bad Boy Calls on the Old Groceryman and Gets Acquainted with His New Dog -- Off Again to See America . The old groceryman was sitting in the old grocery one fine spring morning looking over his accounts , as they were written on a quire of brown wrapping paper with a blunt lead pencil , and wondering where he could go to collect money to pay a note that was due at the bank at noon on that day . He was looking ten years older than he did the year before when the Bad Boy had played his last trick on the old man , and gone abroad to chaperone his sick father , in a search for health and adventure . The old man had missed the boy around the grocery , and with no one to keep his blood circulating , and his temperature occasionally soaring above the normal , he had failed in health , and had read with mixed feelings of joy , fear and resentment that the Bad Boy and his dad had arrived home , and he knew it could not be long before the boy would blow in , and he was trying to decide whether to meet the boy cheerfully and with a spirit of resignation , or to meet him with a club , whether to give him the glad hand , or form himself into a column of fours to drive him out when he came . He had accumulated a terrier dog since the boy went away , to be company for the old singed cat , to hunt rats in the cellar , and to watch the store nights .