chapter 3 Jem manages to stop the fight between Scout and Walter Cunningham and on spontaneously invites him for dinner. Scout makes an involuntary remark about Walter’s strange eating habits at the dining table, and is severely reprimanded by Calpurnia.
Back at school, Miss Carolina is disgusted to see a louse in Burris Ewell’s hair and sends him home to get clean. The boy’s rude behavior shocks the teacher and one student offers an explanation about the lifestyle of the Ewells, who breach all rules and live a life of sloth. Back home, Scout wonders aloud to her father, whether she too could skip school and stay at home like the Ewells. Atticus explains to her that sometimes rules are bent to maintain the harmony in society, but Scout would have to go to school.
chapter 4 On this particular day, as Scout runs back home from school, she sees something glistening on the oak tree outside the Radley house. Taking courage, she retraces her steps to investigate and finds some chewing gum wrapped in tin foil and stuffed into a hole in the its trunk.
Jem, on discovering it, makes Scout spit it out. But the very next day, when they pass by the same place, they discover a box containing two shining pennies in it. Initially they decide to inquire if anybody has lost some pennies, and if there would be no claimants, they decide to pocket it themselves.
Dill arrives in a blaze of glory and a fanfare of fantasies. While they are playing together, Scout gets into an old tire which is pushed over by Jem. It starts rolling down the road and stops right outside the Radley house. In her fright, Scout runs back, leaving the tire behind. Jem, with much ado at bravery, ultimately retrieves it. Then they plan out a pantomime game, with Jem pretending to be Boo, continually howling and shrieking away. They even act out the scene where Boo had supposedly plunged a knife through his father’s pants.
Unfortunately for them, Atticus catches them at it and the game is stopped. Scout remembers that on the day she had rolled into the Radley front yard, she had heard a low sound of laughter from inside the house.
chapter 5 Jem and Dill grow closer, and Scout begins to feel left out of their friendship. As a result, she starts spending much of her time with one of their neighbors: Miss Maudie Atkinson, a widow with a talent for gardening and cake baking who was a childhood friend of Atticus’s brother, Jack. She tells Scout that Boo Radley is still alive and it is her theory Boo is the victim of a harsh father (now deceased), a “foot-washing” Baptist who believed that most people are going to hell. Miss Maudie adds that Boo was always polite and friendly as a child. She says that most of the rumors about him are false, but that if he wasn’t crazy as a boy, he probably is by now.
Meanwhile, Jem and Dill plan to give a note to Boo inviting him out to get ice cream with them. They try to stick the note in a window of the Radley Place with a fishing pole, but Atticus catches them and orders them to “stop tormenting that man” with either notes or the “Boo Radley” game.
