“But,” he tried, “but, but.”

“Now,” said Georgie, “here is what I should call real dirt. There’s one slovo beginning with an f and another with a c.” He had a book called ‘The Miracle of the Snowflake.’

“Oh,” said poor old Dim, smotting over Pete’s shoulder and going too far, like he always did, “it says here what he done to her, and there’s a picture and all. Why,” he said, “you’re nothing but a filthy-minded old skitebird.”

“An old man of your age, brother,” I said, and I started to rip up the book I’d got, and the others did the same with the ones they had. Dim and Pete doing a tug-of-war with ‘The Rhombohedral System.’ The starry prof type began to creech: “But those are not mine, those are the property of the municipality, this is sheer wantonness and vandal work,” or some such slovos. And he tried to sort of wrest the books back off of us, which was like pathetic. “You deserve to be taught a lesson, brother,” I said, “that you do.” This crystal book I had was very tough-bound and hard to razrez to bits, being real starry and made in days when things were made to last like, but I managed to rip the pages up and chuck them in handfuls of like snowflakes, though big, all over this creeching old veck, and then the others did the same with theirs, old Dim just dancing about like the clown he was. “There you are,” said Pete. “There’s the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.”

“You naughty old veck, you,” I said, and then we began to filly about with him. Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies, upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like, being made of some new horrorshow plastic stuff.