A week in town has made many a boy so smart that you couldn't touch him with a ten foot pole.

It starches them up so stiff that sometimes they don't know their own mothers, and deem it a piece of condescension to speak a word to the patriarch in a blue frock who had the honor of supporting them in childhood.
Bobby was none of this sort.

We lament that he had a habit of talking big--that is, of talking about business affairs in a style a little beyond his years.

But he was modest to a fault, paradoxical as it may seem.

He was always blushing when any body spoke a pretty thing about him.