[Illustration: Cover]

[Illustration: "ONE DAY HE CAME UP TO MY BOY WHERE HE SAT FISHING. "

 [See p. 66]]

A BOY'S TOWN

DESCRIBED FOR "HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE"

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "THE SHADOW OF A DREAM" "APRIL HOPES" "A HAZARD OF NEWFORTUNES" ETC. 

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HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

Copyright, 1890, by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 

 * * * * *

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS. 

 CHAPTER PAGE I. EARLIEST EXPERIENCES 1 II. HOME AND KINDRED 10 III. THE RIVER 24 IV. THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN 36 V. THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS. --OLD RIVER 45 VI. SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 53 VII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 67 VIII. PLAYS AND PASTIMES 80 IX. CIRCUSES AND SHOWS 93 X. HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS 110 XI. MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS 121 XII. PETS 133 XIII. GUNS AND GUNNING 148 XIV. FORAGING 161 XV. MY BOY 171 XVI. OTHER BOYS 183 XVII. FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS 197 XVIII. THE NATURE OF BOYS 205 XIX. THE TOWN ITSELF 215 XX. TRAITS AND CHARACTERS 228 XXI. LAST DAYS 237

ILLUSTRATIONS. 

 "ONE DAY HE CAME UP TO MY BOY WHERE HE SAT FISHING" _Frontispiece. _ THE "FIRST LOCK" _Facing p. _ 2 "THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN" " 8 "RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!" " 18 "HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW" " 44 "THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVE MENTIONED" " 50 "A CITIZEN'S CHARACTER FOR CLEVERNESS OR MEANNESS WAS FIXED BY HIS WALKING ROUND OR OVER THE RINGS" " 82 KITE TIME " 92 "THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS" " 110 THE "BUTLER GUARDS" " 122 "ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE" " 150 FORAGING " 168 "THE BEACON OF DEATH " " 180 "HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD" " 198 "THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF" " 220 "MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE" " 224

A BOY'S TOWN. 

I. 

EARLIEST EXPERIENCES. 

I CALL it a Boy's Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as atown appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when heseldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middleof a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things. He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angelsascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, andhe knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy's world. Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep theignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven hasbeen shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not knowwhat I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that theungrown-up children will, and that the boys who read _Harper's YoungPeople_ will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, evenif he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps Imean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing--they have been usedso often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doingsand dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings anddreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, myboy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody's boy; and I mean himsometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular. 

[Illustration: THE "FIRST LOCK. "]

It seems to me that my Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for aboy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was asblue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had anotherriver, called the Old River, which was the Miami's former channel, andwhich held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it TheIsland; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps itwas not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and aFirst Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, butthe Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy wasvery little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had aHydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill power throughthe heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; theBig Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ranunder mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streamsand courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long theyhad boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice ofthe mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Thenthere were the Commons; a wide expanse of open fields, where the cowswere pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, andpractised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses. 

There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River, and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in thewoods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them, and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees. There were no othernuts except walnuts, white and black; but there was no end to the small, sweetish acorns, which the boys called chinquepins; they ate them, but Idoubt if they liked them, except as boys like anything to eat. In thevast corn-fields stretching everywhere along the river levels there werequails; and rabbits in the sumac thickets and turnip patches. There wereplaces to swim, to fish, to hunt, to skate; if there were no hills forcoasting, that was not so much loss, for there was very little snow, andit melted in a day or two after it fell. But besides these naturaladvantages for boys, there were artificial opportunities which the boystreated as if they had been made for them; grist-mills on the river andcanal, cotton-factories and saw-mills on the Hydraulic, iron-founderiesby the Commons, breweries on the river-bank, and not too manyschool-houses. I must not forget the market-house, with its publicmarket twice a week, and its long rows of market-wagons, stretching oneither side of High Street in the dim light of the summer dawn or thecold sun of the winter noon. 

The place had its brief history running back to the beginning of thecentury. Mad Anthony Wayne encamped on its site when he went north toavenge St. Clair's defeat on the Indians; it was at first a fort, and itremained a military post until the tribes about were reduced, and a fortwas no longer needed. To this time belonged a tragedy, which my boy knewof vaguely when he was a child. Two of the soldiers were sentenced to behanged for desertion, and the officer in command hurried forward theexecution, although an express had been sent to lay the case before thegeneral at another post. The offence was only a desertion in name, andthe reprieve was promptly granted, but it came fifteen minutes too late. 

I believe nothing more memorable ever happened in my Boy's Town, as thegrown-up world counts events; but for the boys there, every day was fullof wonderful occurrence and thrilling excitement. It was really a verysimple little town of some three thousand people, living for the mostpart in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick houseof two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy'sfather came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretchedeastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, thecounty buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a fewother stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from itto the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy's fancy, where he might get lost--the sum of all disaster--if he ventured awayfrom the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on itssouthwestern border. It was the great political year of "Tippecanoe andTyler too, " when the grandfather of our President Harrison was electedPresident; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy's littlelife without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of hisfather wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist andfringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the goodold pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often, and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was aman who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but itremained in my boy's mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of bluebroadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloakwas such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and menwore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border, and hold by his father's hand in the warmth and dark it made around himwas something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that broughthim a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could evergive. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoyit, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening;and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasingfor a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had somethinghidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he hadbrought him the little axe, but his father said, "Feel, feel!" and hefound his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in azeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far helearned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfyyourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may havefound that out, too; at any rate, my boy did not keep the family infirewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-lifewas a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must havebeen laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he couldrecall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit, which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, aspeople said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania Germankindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gaycolors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for anyother suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy'sadvance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt itcommended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to beeven beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as hepassed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks andfour-o'clocks. 

The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-upchild, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Likethe savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar systemrevolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It hasno meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; itis for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, sensations, for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law offavor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make acrueller idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his worldand having him for its chief concern. What remained to my boy of thatfaint childish consciousness was the idea of some sort of supernal Beingwho abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and madewinter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of afamily of which he was necessarily the centre, and of that far, vast, unknown Town, lurking all round him, and existing on account of him ifnot because of him. So, unless I manage to treat my Boy's Town as a partof his own being, I shall not make others know it just as he knew it. 

Some of his memories reach a time earlier than his third year, andrelate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where hismother's people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two orthree years the river rose and flooded the village; and hisgrandmother's household was taken out of the second-story window in askiff; but no one minded a trivial inconvenience like that, any morethan the Romans have minded the annual freshet of the Tiber for the lastthree or four thousand years. When the waters went down the familyreturned and scrubbed out the five or six inches of rich mud they hadleft. In the meantime, it was a godsend to all boys of an age to enjoyit; but it was nothing out of the order of Providence. So, if my boyever saw a freshet, it naturally made no impression upon him. What heremembered was something much more important, and that was waking up onemorning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside hisbed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his veryearliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloomwithout a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that

 "Heaven lies about us in our infancy. "

Over the spot where the little house once stood, a railroad has drawnits erasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down andbuilt up brick by brick in quite another place; but the bloomingpeach-tree glows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change. The tender, pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long yearsafterwards in the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, butalways with a reminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smokytown on the banks of the Ohio. 

[Illustration: "THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN. "]

Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpseof a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with his head upand his antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might neverhave seen him so; he may have had the vision at second hand; but it iscertain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was aslikely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. Oneof the boy's uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far tothe southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought himhome. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferryinghim over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloonsof the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at thewatch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to thetrousers. He grew very tame, and butted children over, right and left, in the village streets; and he behaved like one of the family wheneverhe got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, andplundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him, and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot. 

Besides the peach-tree and the pet deer there was only one other thingthat my boy could remember, or seem to remember, of the few years beforehe came to the Boy's Town. He is on the steamboat which is carrying thefamily down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, on their way to the Boy'sTown, and he is kneeling on the window-seat in the ladies' cabin at thestern of the boat, watching the rain fall into the swirling yellow riverand make the little men jump up from the water with its pelting drops. He knows that the boat is standing still, and they are bringing off apassenger to it in a yawl, as they used to do on the Western rivers whenthey were hailed from some place where there was no wharf-boat. If theywere going down stream, they turned the boat and headed up the river, and then with a great deal of scurrying about among the deck-hands, andswearing among the mates, they sent the yawl ashore, and bustled thepassenger on board. In the case which my boy seemed to remember, thepassenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl, with hiscrutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand; his family must bewatching him from the house. When the yawl comes alongside he tries tostep aboard the steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into theyellow river, and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy, and itis as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-drops. Whatmade my boy think when he grew a man that this was truly a memory wasthat he remembered nothing else of the incident, nothing whatever afterthe man went down in the water, though there must have been a great andpainful tumult, and a vain search for him. His drowning had exactly thevalue in the child's mind that the jumping up of the little men had, neither more nor less. 

II. 

HOME AND KINDRED. 

AS the Boy's Town was, in one sense, merely a part of the boy, I think Ihad better tell something about my boy's family first, and theinfluences that formed his character, so that the reader can be a boywith him there on the intimate terms which are the only terms of truefriendship. His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welshflannels, who had founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay, on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of his mills, still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father's birthplace afew years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, asthe Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, andhe had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity, and hecame out to America towards the close of the last century to prospectfor these as well as for a good location to manufacture Welsh flannels;but after being presented to Washington, then President, atPhiladelphia, and buying a tract of land somewhere near the District ofColumbia, his phantom rolls a shadowy barrel of dollars on board ship atBaltimore, and sails back in the _Flying Dutchman_ to South Wales. Ifancy, from the tradition of the dollars, that he had made good affairshere with the stock of flannels he brought over with him; but all israther uncertain about him, especially the land he bought, though thestory of it is pretty sure to fire some descendant of his in each newgeneration with the wish to go down to Washington, and oust the peoplethere who have unrightfully squatted on the ancestral property. What isunquestionable is that this old gentleman went home and never came outhere again; but his son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailedwith his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy's father was a year old. From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in NewYork, Virginia, and Ohio, setting up the machinery of woollen mills, andfinally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at theBoy's Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugsand books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He hadlong ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteouscause; and brought shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionistin days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy's fatherrestored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or aconstitutional anti-slavery man. The grandfather was a ferventMethodist, but the father, after many years of scepticism, had become areceiver of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg; and in this faith thechildren were brought up. It was not only their faith, but their life, and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious household, though they never went to church, because it was the Old Church. Theyhad no service of the New Church, the Swedenborgians were so few in theplace, except when some of its ministers stopped with us on theirtravels. My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, andwhile one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear inwhich his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for thetime being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Theirreligion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church, who thought them a kind of Universalists. But the boy once heard hisfather explain to one of them that the New Church people believed in ahell, which each cast himself into if he loved the evil rather than thegood, and that no mercy could keep him out of without destroying him, for a man's love was his very self. It made his blood run cold, and heresolved that rather than cast himself into hell, he would do his poorbest to love the good. The children were taught when they teased oneanother that there was nothing the fiends so much delighted in asteasing. When they were angry and revengeful, they were told that nowthey were calling evil spirits about them, and that the good angelscould not come near them if they wished while they were in that state. My boy preferred the company of good angels after dark, and especiallyabout bedtime, and he usually made the effort to get himself into anaccessible frame of mind before he slept; by day he felt that he couldlook out for himself, and gave way to the natural man like other boys. Isuppose the children had their unwholesome spiritual pride in beingdifferent from their fellows in religion; but, on the other hand, ittaught them not to fear being different from others if they believedthemselves right. Perhaps it made my boy rather like it. 

The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit, but of a tender and lovingheart, whose usual word with a child, when he caressed it, was "Poorthing, poor thing!" as if he could only pity it; and I have no doubtthe father's religion was a true affliction to him. The children weretaken to visit their grandmother every Sunday noon, and then the fatherand grandfather never failed to have it out about the New Church and theOld. I am afraid that the father would sometimes forget his ownprecepts, and tease a little; when the mother went with him she wassometimes troubled at the warmth with which the controversy raged. Thegrandmother seemed to be bored by it, and the boys, who cared nothingfor salvation in the abstract, no matter how anxious they were about themain chance, certainly shared this feeling with her. She was a pale, little, large-eyed lady, who always wore a dress of Quakerish plainness, with a white kerchief crossed upon her breast; and her aquiline nose andjutting chin almost met. She was very good to the children and at thesetimes she usually gave them some sugar-cakes, and sent them out in theyard, where there was a young Newfoundland dog, of loose morals and noreligious ideas, who joined them in having fun, till the father came outand led them home. He would not have allowed them to play where it couldhave aggrieved any one, for a prime article of his religion was torespect the religious feelings of others, even when he thought themwrong. But he would not suffer the children to get the notion that theywere guilty of any deadly crime if they happened to come short of theconventional standard of piety. Once, when their grandfather reported tohim that the boys had been seen throwing stones on Sunday at the body ofa dog lodged on some drift in the river, he rebuked them for theindecorum, and then ended the matter, as he often did, by saying, "Boys, consider yourselves soundly thrashed. "

I should be sorry if anything I have said should give the idea thattheir behavior was either fantastic or arrogant through their religion. It was simply a pervading influence; and I am sure that in the fatherand mother it dignified life, and freighted motive and action here withthe significance of eternal fate. When the children were taught that inevery thought and in every deed they were choosing their portion withthe devils or the angels, and that God himself could not save themagainst themselves, it often went in and out of their minds, as suchthings must with children; but some impression remained and helped themto realize the serious responsibility they were under to their ownafter-selves. At the same time, the father, who loved a joke almost asmuch as he loved a truth, and who despised austerity as somethingowlish, set them the example of getting all the harmless fun they couldout of experience. They had their laugh about nearly everything that wasnot essentially sacred; they were made to feel the ludicrous as analleviation of existence; and the father and mother were with them onthe same level in all this enjoyment. 

The house was pretty full of children, big and little. There were sevenof them in the Boy's Town, and eight afterwards in all; so that if therehad been no Boy's Town about them, they would still have had a Boy'sWorld indoors. They lived in three different houses--the Thomas house, the Smith house, and the Falconer house--severally called after thenames of their owners, for they never had a house of their own. Of thefirst my boy remembered nothing, except the woodpile on which he triedhis axe, and a closet near the front door, which he entered into oneday, with his mother's leave, to pray, as the Scripture bade. It wasvery dark, and hung full of clothes, and his literal application of thetext was not edifying; he fancied, with a child's vague suspicion, thatit amused his father and mother; I dare say it also touched them. Of theSmith house, he could remember much more: the little upper room wherethe boys slept, and the narrow stairs which he often rolled down in themorning; the front room where he lay sick with a fever, and was bled bythe doctor, as people used to be in those days; the woodshed where, onedreadful afternoon, when he had somehow been left alone in the house, hetook it into his head that the family dog Tip was going mad; the windowwhere he traced the figure of a bull on greased paper from an engravingheld up against the light: none of them important facts, but such asstick in the mind by the capricious action of memory, while far greaterevents drop out of it. My boy's elder brother at once accused him oftracing that bull, which he pretended to have copied; but their fatherinsisted upon taking the child's word for it, though he must have knownhe was lying; and this gave my boy a far worse conscience than if hisfather had whipped him. The father's theory was that people are more aptto be true if you trust them than if you doubt them; I do not think healways found it work perfectly; but I believe he was right. 

My boy was for a long time very miserable about that bull, and theexperience taught him to desire the truth and honor it, even when hecould not attain it. Five or six years after, when his brother and hehad begun to read stories, they found one in the old _New York Mirror_which had a great influence upon their daily conduct. It was called "TheTrippings of Tom Pepper; or, the Effects of Romancing, " and it showedhow at many important moments the hero had been baulked of fortune byhis habit of fibbing. They took counsel together, and pledged themselvesnot to tell the smallest lie, upon any occasion whatever. It was afrightful slavery, for there are a great many times in a boy's life whenit seems as if the truth really could not serve him. Their great trialwas having to take a younger brother with them whenever they wanted togo off with other boys; and it had been their habit to get away from himby many little deceits which they could not practise now: to tell himthat their mother wanted him; or to send him home upon some errand tohis pretended advantage that had really no object but his absence. Isuppose there is now no boy living who would do this. My boy and hisbrother groaned under their good resolution, I do not know how long; butthe day came when they could bear it no longer, though I cannot givejust the time or the terms of their backsliding. That elder brother hadbeen hard enough on my boy before the period of this awful reform: hisuprightness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness were a daily reproachto him, and it did not need this season of absolute sincerity tocomplete his wretchedness. Yet it was an experience which afterwards hewould not willingly have missed: for once in his little confused life hehad tried to practise a virtue because the opposite vice had been madeto appear foolish and mischievous to him; and not from any superstitiousfear or hope. 

As far as I can make out, he had far more fears than hopes; and perhapsevery boy has. It was in the Smith house that he began to be afraid ofghosts, though he never saw one, or anything like one. He never saweven the good genius who came down the chimney and filled the children'sstockings at Christmas. He wished to see him; but he understood that St. Nicholas was a shy spirit, and was apt to pass by the stockings of boyswho lay in wait for him. His mother had told him how the Peltsnickelused to come with a bundle of rods for the bad children when theChriskingle brought the presents of the good ones, among hisgrandmother's Pennsylvania German kindred; and he had got them allsomehow mixed up together. Then St. Nicholas, though he was so pleasantand friendly in the poem about the night before Christmas, was known tosome of the neighbor boys as Santa Claus; they called it Centre Claws, and my boy imagined him with large talons radiating from the pit of hisstomach. But this was all nothing to the notion of Dowd's spectacles, which his father sometimes joked him about, and which were representedby a pair of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in thestreet. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may havebeen an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died, or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention ofhis spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of theghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; hecould never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can everexplain just why it is affected in this way or that way by the thingsthat are or are not in the world about it; it is not easy to do this forone's self in after-life. At any rate, it is certain that my boy dweltmost of his time amid shadows that were, perhaps, projected over hisnarrow outlook from some former state of being, or from the gloomyminds of long-dead ancestors. His home was cheerful and most happy, buthe peopled all its nooks and corners with shapes of doom and horror. Theother boys were not slow to find this out, and their invention suppliedwith ready suggestion of officers and prisons any little lack of miseryhis spectres and goblins left. He often narrowly escaped arrest, orthought so, when they built a fire in the street at night, and suddenlykicked it to pieces, and shouted, "Run, run! The constable will catchyou!" Nothing but flight saved my boy, in these cases, when he wassmall. He grew bolder, after a while, concerning constables, but neverconcerning ghosts; they shivered in the autumnal evenings among the tallstalks of the corn-field that stretched, a vast wilderness, behind thehouse to the next street, and they walked the night everywhere. 

[Illustration: "RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!"]

Yet nothing more tragical, that he could remember, really happened whilehe lived in the Smith house than something he saw one bright sunnymorning, while all the boys were hanging on the fence of the next house, and watching the martins flying down to the ground from their box in thegable. The birds sent out sharp cries of terror or anger, and presentlyhe saw a black cat crouching in the grass, with half-shut eyes and anair of dreamy indifference. The birds swept down in longer and lowerloops towards the cat, drawn by some fatal charm, or by fear of thedanger that threatened their colony from the mere presence of the cat;but she did not stir. Suddenly she sprang into the air, and then dartedaway with a martin in her mouth, while my boy's heart leaped into hisown, and the other boys rushed after the cat. 

As when something dreadful happens, this seemed not to have happened;but a lovely experience leaves a sense of enduring fact behind, andremains a rich possession no matter how slight and simple it was. Myboy's mother has been dead almost a quarter of a century, but as one ofthe elder children he knew her when she was young and gay; and his lastdistinct association with the Smith house is of coming home with herafter a visit to her mother's far up the Ohio River. In their absencethe June grass, which the children's feet always kept trampled down solow, had flourished up in purple blossom, and now stood rank and tall;and the mother threw herself on her knees in it, and tossed andfrolicked with her little ones like a girl. The picture remains, and thewonder of the world in which it was true once, while all thephantasmagory of spectres has long vanished away. 

The boy could not recall the family's removal to the Falconer house. They were not there, and then they were there. It was a brick house, ata corner of the principal street, and in the gable there were places formock-windows where there had never been blinds put, but where theswallows had thickly built their nests. I dare say my boy might havebeen willing to stone these nests, but he was not allowed, either he orhis mates, who must have panted with him to improve such an opportunityof havoc. There was a real window in the gable from which he could lookout of the garret; such a garret as every boy should once have the useof some time in his life. It was dim and low, though it seemed high, andthe naked brown rafters were studded with wasps' nests; and the rainbeat on the shingles overhead. The house had been occupied by aphysician, and under the eaves the children found heaps of phials fullof doctor's stuff; the garret abounded in their own family boxes andbarrels, but there was always room for a swing, which the boys used intraining for their circuses. Below the garret there were two unimportantstories with chambers, dining-room, parlor, and so on; then you came tothe brick-paved kitchen in the basement, and a perfectly gloriouscellar, with rats in it. Outside there was a large yard, with five orsix huge old cherry-trees, and a garden plot, where every spring my boytried to make a garden, with never-failing failure. 

The house gave even to him a sense of space unknown before, and he couldrecall his mother's satisfaction in it. He has often been back there indreams, and found it on the old scale of grandeur; but no doubt it was avery simple affair. The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place sooverwhelmingly democratic as the Boy's Town were not such as could havewarranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as theworld goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in theirway they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men towork for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, asthey grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grewold enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office beforehe was ten years of age. This was not altogether because he was neededthere, I dare say, but because it was part of his father's Swedenborgianphilosophy that every one should fulfil a use; I do not know that whenthe boy wanted to go swimming, or hunting, or skating, it consoled himmuch to reflect that the angels in the highest heaven delighted inuses; nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe notso much use. 

If his mother did her own work, with help only now and then from a hiredgirl, that was the custom of the time and country; and her memory wasalways the more reverend to him, because whenever he looked back at herin those dim years, he saw her about some of those household officeswhich are so beautiful to a child. She was always the best and tenderestmother, and her love had the heavenly art of making each child feelitself the most important, while she was partial to none. In spite ofher busy days she followed their father in his religion and literature, and at night, when her long toil was over, she sat with the children andlistened while he read aloud. The first book my boy remembered to haveheard him read was Moore's "Lalla Rookh, " of which he formed but a vaguenotion, though while he struggled after its meaning he took all itsmusic in, and began at once to make rhymes of his own. He had noconception of literature except the pleasure there was in making it; andhe had no outlook into the world of it, which must have been pretty opento his father. The father read aloud some of Dickens's Christmasstories, then new; and the boy had a good deal of trouble with the"Haunted Man. " One rarest night of all, the family sat up till twoo'clock, listening to a novel that my boy long ago forgot the name of, if he ever knew its name. It was all about a will, forged or lost, andthere was a great scene in court, and after that the mother declaredthat she could not go to bed till she heard the end. His own firstreading was in history. At nine years of age he read the history ofGreece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a littlewhile after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; buthe did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who readnovels, and a novel was like "Handy Andy, " or "Harry Lorrequer, " or the"Bride of Lammermoor. " His brother had another novel which theypreferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library of Select Novels, "and was called "Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment, " and itwas about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. Itbewitched them, and though my boy could not afterwards recall a singlefact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's eye every traitof its outward aspect. It was at this time that his father bought anEnglish-Spanish grammar from a returned volunteer, who had picked it upin the city of Mexico, and gave it to the boy. He must have expected himto learn Spanish from it; but the boy did not know even the parts ofspeech in English. As the father had once taught English grammar in sixlessons, from a broadside of his own authorship, he may have expectedthe principle of heredity to help the boy; and certainly he did dig theEnglish grammar out of that blessed book, and the Spanish language withit, but after many long years, and much despair over the differencebetween a preposition and a substantive. 

All this went along with great and continued political excitement, andwith some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then;nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boygrew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even inthe little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. Fromthe first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of thelower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, themargin of their own abundance must have been narrower than they everknew then; but if they had been of the most prosperous, their bent inthis matter would have been the same. Once there was a church festival, or something of that sort, and there was a good deal of the provisionleft over, which it was decided should be given to the poor. This wasvery easy, but it was not so easy to find the poor whom it should begiven to. At last a hard-working widow was chosen to receive it; theladies carried it to her front door and gave it her, and she carried itto her back door and threw it into the alley. No doubt she had enoughwithout it, but there were circumstances of indignity or patronageattending the gift which were recognized in my boy's home, and whichhelped afterwards to make him doubtful of all giving, except thehumblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving atall. 

III. 

THE RIVER. 

IT seems to me that the best way to get at the heart of any boy's townis to take its different watercourses and follow them into it. 

The house where my boy first lived was not far from the river, and hemust have seen it often before he noticed it. But he was not aware of ittill he found it under the bridge. Without the river there could nothave been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look forthe river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long woodentunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these;there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is aboutas far as from the Earth to the planet Mars. On the western shore of theriver is a smaller town than the Boy's Town, and in the perspective theentrance of the bridge on that side is like a dim little doorway. Thetimbers are of a hugeness to strike fear into the heart of the boldestlittle boy; and there is something awful even about the dust in theroadways; soft and thrillingly cool to the boy's bare feet, it liesthick in a perpetual twilight, streaked at intervals by the sun thatslants in at the high, narrow windows under the roof; it has a certainpotent, musty smell. The bridge has three piers, and at low waterhardier adventurers than he wade out to the middle pier; some heroeseven fish there, standing all day on the loose rocks about the base ofthe pier. He shudders to see them, and aches with wonder how they willget ashore. Once he is there when a big boy wades back from the middlepier, where he has been to rob a goose's nest; he has some loose silverchange in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out ofone of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning, gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, inthe cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of thebridge. 

On the bridge he first saw the crazy man who belongs in every boy'stown. In this one he was a hapless, harmless creature, whom the boysknew as Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhapsbecause he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, hemarched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neitherto the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy'spresence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As hisfancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one sovivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him someday, though what he would do with him when he had got him his anguishmust have been too great even to let him guess. Some of the boys saidSolomon had gone crazy from fear of being drafted in the war of 1812;others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite knowthen what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at thepoor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he rangedbetween this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town onthe western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy'sdreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of realoccurrences: he could not tell later whether he once crossed the bridgewhen the footway had been partly taken up, and he had to walk on thegirders, or whether he only dreamed of that awful passage. It was quitefearful enough to cross when the footway was all down, and he could seethe blue gleam of the river far underneath through the cracks betweenthe boards. It made his brain reel; and he felt that he took his life inhis hand whenever he entered the bridge, even when he had grown oldenough to be making an excursion with some of his playmates to the farmof an uncle of theirs who lived two miles up the river. The farmer gavethem all the watermelons they wanted to eat, and on the way home, whenthey lay resting under the sycamores on the river-bank, Solomon Whistlerpassed by in the middle of the road, silent, swift, straight onward. Ido not know why the sight of this afflicted soul did not slay my boy onthe spot, he was so afraid of him; but the crazy man never really hurtany one, though the boys followed and mocked him as soon as he got by. 

The boys knew little or nothing of the river south of the bridge, andfrequented mainly that mile-long stretch of it between the bridge andthe dam, beyond which there was practically nothing for many years;afterwards they came to know that this strange region was inhabited. Just above the bridge the Hydraulic emptied into the river with aheart-shaking plunge over an immense mill-wheel; and there was a clusterof mills at this point, which were useful in accumulating the watersinto fishing-holes before they rushed through the gates upon the wheel. The boys used to play inside the big mill-wheel before the water waslet into the Hydraulic, and my boy caught his first fish in the poolbelow the wheel. The mills had some secondary use in making flour andthe like, but this could not concern a small boy. They were as simply apart of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hungover the river from a point near by, and which seemed to have always anoriole singing in it. All along there the banks were rather steep, andto him they looked very high. The blue clay that formed them was full ofsprings, which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose inglassy falls upon their flutter-mills. As with everything that boys do, these mills were mostly failures; the pins which supported the wheelswere always giving way; and though there were instances of boys whostarted their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away atnoon when they came out of school, none ever carried his enterprise sofar as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-treeby the shore, as they all meant to do. They met such disappointmentswith dauntless cheerfulness, and lightly turned from some burstingbubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored. The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton, but with driftwhich the water had made porous, and which they called smoke-wood. Theymade cigars for their own use out of it, and it seemed to them that itmight be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute fortobacco; but they never got any of it into the market, not even themarket of that world where the currency was pins. 

The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much sucha climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would havechosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it wassometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for thecaves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through theturf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had thejoy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended tolive on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boywhose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn orto bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and thedraft was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little, happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, ormouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank, and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold inthe afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall. 

The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of aquick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summerthat seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its greatattractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to theriver. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then theboys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must havebeen having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swellingwaters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current wouldhave smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round andround, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs andwhole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coopsand pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, therebegan to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meantserious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but theboys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by, and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men whocaught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs atthe points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shoreand stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbidspread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole overtheir tops, and washed into all the hollow places along its shores, andshone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac's Island, which wasalmost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. Whenthe water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave upthe hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose towithin a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had beenthere to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers andswept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward. Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happenin the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning thatthe bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a littlecomfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go, watching as far into the night as nine o'clock with the men who sat upnear the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but notperhaps the leading citizens. 

There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the floodand the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but itleft no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshetrushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking;it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period offishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish inthat part of the Miami; my boy's experience was full of the ignominy ofcatching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they calledthe yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore, who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men whowere reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass. They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets thatthey did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boyscarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast hisline in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. Thesemen often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when takeninwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for theirability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing thatthey should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where theyhad set their poles. 

But they disappear like persons in a dream, and their fishing-timevanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full possession of theriver, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town. The river, theCanal Basin, the Hydraulic and its Reservoirs, seemed all full of boysat the same moment; but perhaps it was not the same, for my boy wasalways in each place, and so he must have been there at different times. Each place had its delights and advantages, but the swimming-holes inthe river were the greatest favorites. He could not remember when hebegan to go into them, though it certainly was before he could swim. There was a time when he was afraid of getting in over his head; but hedid not know just when he learned to swim, any more than he knew when helearned to read; he could not swim, and then he could swim; he could notread, and then he could read; but I dare say the reading came somewhatbefore the swimming. Yet the swimming must have come very early, andcertainly it was kept up with continual practice; he swam quite as muchas he read; perhaps more. The boys had deep swimming-holes and shallowones; and over the deep ones there was always a spring-board, from whichthey threw somersaults, or dived straight down into the depths, wherethere were warm and cold currents mysteriously interwoven. They believedthat these deep holes were infested by water-snakes, though they neversaw any, and they expected to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though thisnever happened. Fiery dragons could not have kept them out;gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believedto abound at the bottom of the deep holes; but the boys never stayedlong in the deep holes, and they preferred the shallow places, where theriver broke into a long ripple (they called it riffle) on its gravellybed, and where they could at once soak and bask in the musical rush ofthe sunlit waters. I have heard people in New England blame all theWestern rivers for being yellow and turbid; but I know that after thespring floods, when the Miami had settled down to its summer businesswith the boys, it was as clear and as blue as if it were spilled out ofthe summer sky. The boys liked the riffle because they could stay in solong there, and there were little landlocked pools and shallows, wherethe water was even warmer, and they could stay in longer. At mostplaces under the banks there was clay of different colors, which theyused for war-paint in their Indian fights; and after they had theirIndian fights they could rush screaming and clattering into the riffle. When the stream had washed them clean down to their red sunburn or theirleathern tan, they could paint up again and have more Indian fights. 

I do not know why my boy's associations with Delorac's Island wereespecially wild in their character, for nothing more like outlawry thanthe game of mumble-the-peg ever occurred there. Perhaps it was becausethe boys had to get to it by water that it seemed beyond the bounds ofcivilization. They might have reached it by the bridge, but the temperof the boys on the western shore was uncertain; they would have had torun the gauntlet of their river-guard on the way up to it; and theymight have been friendly or they might not; it would have depended agood deal on the size and number of the interlopers. Besides, it wasmore glorious to wade across to the island from their side of the river. They undressed and gathered their clothes up into a bundle, which theyput on their heads and held there with one hand, while they used theother for swimming, when they came to a place beyond their depth. Thenthey dressed again, and stretched themselves under the cottonwood-treesand sycamores, and played games and told stories, and longed for a gunto kill the blackbirds which nested in the high tops, and at nightfallmade such a clamor in getting to roost that it almost deafened you. 

My boy never distinctly knew what formed that island, but as there was amill there, it must have been made by the mill-race leaving andrejoining the river. It was enough for him to know that the island wasthere, and that a parrot--a screaming, whistling, and laughing parrot, which was a Pretty Poll, and always Wanted a Cracker--dwelt in a prettycottage, almost hidden in trees, just below the end of the island. Thisparrot had the old Creole gentleman living with it who owned the island, and whom it had brought from New Orleans. The boys met him now and thenas he walked abroad, with a stick, and his large stomach bowed in frontof him. For no reason under the sun they were afraid of him; perhapsthey thought he resented their parleys with the parrot. But he and theparrot existed solely to amuse and to frighten them; and on their ownside of the river, just opposite the island, there were established somesmall industries for their entertainment and advantage, on a branch ofthe Hydraulic. I do not know just what it was they did with amustard-mill that was there, but the turning-shop supplied them with adeep bed of elastic shavings just under the bank, which they turnedsomersaults into, when they were not turning them into the river. 

I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging orinviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy's Town usedto make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up theforefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they didthis when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and whenthey did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often whenthey just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really hadto be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in atall; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; andas they all _had_ to go in at least three or four times a day, somesort of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone. Since this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, atone time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or afterthe fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and therea boy, like my boy's elder brother, would not tell lies at all, evenabout going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to theirhard fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, andthen they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they hadmade this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got theirshirts on wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, someenemy came upon them and tied their shirts. There are few crueltieswhich public opinion in the boys' world condemns, but I am glad toremember, to their honor, that there were not many in that Boy's Townwho would tie shirts; and I fervently hope that there is no boy nowliving who would do it. As the crime is probably extinct, I will saythat in those wicked days, if you were such a miscreant, and there wassome boy you hated, you stole up and tied the hardest kind of a knot inone arm or both arms of his shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it intoyour heart, you soaked the knot in water, and pounded it with a stone. 

I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senselessenough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It washis brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it washis own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bittertears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do, tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth, knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the factthat they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut offthe sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without theshirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry. 

There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when theywent in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitlyforbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took thecourse of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled thehome hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law andbeen forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bankand called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and itcovered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, aschildren do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, hefully expiated; and I will whisper to the Young People here at the endof the chapter, that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, andinsist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning, but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as ourthoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen soand so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened tohappen to me when I had done wrong. 

IV. 

THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN. 

THE canal came from Lake Erie, two hundred miles to the northward, andjoined the Ohio River twenty miles south of the Boy's Town. For a timemy boy's father was collector of tolls on it, but even when he was oldenough to understand that his father held this State office (the canalbelonged to the State) because he had been such a good Whig, andpublished the Whig newspaper, he could not grasp the notion of thedistance which the canal-boats came out of and went into. He saw themcome and he saw them go; he did not ask whence or whither; his wonder, if he had any about them, did not go beyond the second lock. It was hardenough to get it to the head of the Basin, which left the canal half amile or so to the eastward, and stretched down into the town, a sheet ofsmooth water, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and a hundred wide; his senseached with, the effort of conceiving of the other side of it. The Basinwas bordered on either side near the end by pork-houses, where the porkwas cut up and packed, and then lay in long rows of barrels on thebanks, with other long rows of salt-barrels, and yet other long rows ofwhiskey-barrels; cooper-shops, where the barrels were made, alternatedwith the pork-houses. The boats brought the salt and carried away thepork and whiskey; but the boy's practical knowledge of them was thatthey lay there for the boys to dive off of when they went in swimming, and to fish under. The water made a soft tuck-tucking at the sterns ofthe boat, and you could catch sunfish, if you were the right kind of aboy, or the wrong kind; the luck seemed to go a good deal with boys whowere not good for much else. Some of the boats were open their wholelength, with a little cabin at the stern, and these pretended to be forcarrying wood and stone, but really again were for the use of the boysafter a hard rain, when they held a good deal of water, and you couldpole yourself up and down on the loose planks in them. The boys formedthe notion at times that some of these boats were abandoned by theirowners, and they were apt to be surprised by their sudden return. Afeeling of transgression was mixed up with the joys of this kind ofnavigation; perhaps some of the boys were forbidden it. No limit wasplaced on their swimming in the Basin, except that of the law whichprohibited it in the daytime, as the Basin was quite in the heart of thetown. In the warm summer nights of that southerly latitude, the waterswarmed with laughing, shouting, screaming boys, who plunged from thebanks and rioted in the delicious water, diving and ducking, flying andfollowing, safe in the art of swimming which all of them knew. Theyturned somersaults from the decks of the canal-boats; some of the boyscould turn double somersaults, and one boy got so far as to turn asomersault and a half; it was long before the time of electric lighting, but when he struck the water there came a flash that seemed to illuminethe universe. 

I am afraid that the Young People will think I am telling them too muchabout swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind ofamphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almostas much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike theriver, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the veryfirst things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there, whena young man caught him up into his arms, and skated off with him almostas far away as the canal. He remembered the fearful joy of theadventure, and the pride, too; for he had somehow the notion that thisyoung fellow was handsome and fine, and did him an honor by hisnotice--so soon does some dim notion of worldly splendor turn us intosnobs! The next thing was his own attempt at skating, when he was setdown from the bank by his brother, full of a vainglorious confidence inhis powers, and appeared instantly to strike on the top of his head. Afterwards he learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more thanhe knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He becamepassionately fond of skating, and kept at it all day long when there wasice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a verylittle ice go a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it forskating as soon as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of themever got drowned there; though a boy would often start from one bank andgo flying to the other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thinsheet sank and swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually theice was not thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must havebeen on ice which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated allone bitter afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At firsthis feet were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and atlast he did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he toldone of the big boys. "Why, your feet are frozen!" said the big boy, andhe dragged off my boy's skates, and the little one ran all the long milehome, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet mightdrop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl ofice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed themout; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: itwas intense, and there must have been a time afterwards when he did notuse his feet. 

His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smileat nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty yearsago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme, which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. Youfound an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies withguttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhapscurling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in anacorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore thatskate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brassacorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought yourskates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly aboutwhile he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to borethem through with a hot iron yourself. Then you took them to a saddler, and got him to make straps for them; that is, if you were rich, and yourfather let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you putstrings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off, or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down onone side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on theice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper's shavings, and couldsit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stories, betweenyour flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from thefrozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among theembers. 

Beyond the pork-houses, and up farther towards the canal, there weresome houses under the Basin banks. They were good places for thefever-and-ague which people had in those days without knowing it wasmalaria, or suffering it to interfere much with the pleasure andbusiness of life; but they seemed to my boy bowers of delight, especially one where there was a bear, chained to a weeping-willow, andanother where there was a fishpond with gold-fish in it. He expectedthis bear to get loose and eat him, but that could not spoil hispleasure in seeing the bear stand on his hind-legs and open his redmouth, as I have seen bears do when you wound them up by a keyhole inthe side. In fact, a toy bear is very much like a real bear, and saferto have round. The boys were always wanting to go and look at this bear, but he was not so exciting as the daily arrival of the Dayton packet. Tomy boy's young vision this craft was of such incomparable lightness andgrace as no yacht of Mr. Burgess's could rival. When she came in of asummer evening her deck was thronged with people, and the captain stoodwith his right foot on the spring-catch that held the tow-rope. Thewater curled away on either side of her sharp prow, that cut its wayonward at the full rate of five miles an hour, and the team cameswinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting thehindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loudexplosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys intown were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break andfly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses' feet; andsuddenly the captain pressed his foot on the spring and released thetow-rope. The driver kept on to the stable with unslackened speed, andthe line followed him, swishing and skating over the water, while thesteersman put his helm hard aport, and the packet rounded to, and swamsoftly and slowly up to her moorings. No steamer arrives from Europe nowwith such thrilling majesty. 

The canal-boatmen were all an heroic race, and the boys humbly hopedthat some day, if they proved worthy, they might grow up to be drivers;not indeed packet-drivers; they were not so conceited as that; butfreight-boat drivers, of two horses, perhaps, but gladly of one. High orlow, the drivers had a great deal of leisure, which commended theircalling to the boyish fancy; and my boy saw them, with a longing tospeak to them, even to approach them, never satisfied, while they amusedthe long summer afternoon in the shade of the tavern by a game of skillpeculiar to them. They put a tack into a whiplash, and then, whirling itround and round, drove it to the head in a target marked out on theweather-boarding. Some of them had a perfect aim; and in fact it was avery pretty feat, and well worth seeing. 

Another feat, which the pioneers of the region had probably learned fromthe Indians, was throwing the axe. The thrower caught the axe by the endof the helve, and with a dextrous twirl sent it flying through the air, and struck its edge into whatever object he aimed at--usually a tree. Two of the Basin loafers were brothers, and they were always quarrellingand often fighting. One was of the unhappy fraternity of town-drunkards, and somehow the boys thought him a finer fellow than the other, whomsomehow they considered "mean, " and they were always of his side intheir controversies. One afternoon these brothers quarrelled a longtime, and then the sober brother retired to the doorway of a pork-house, where he stood, probably brooding upon his injuries, when the drunkard, who had remained near the tavern, suddenly caught up an axe and flungit; the boys saw it sail across the corner of the Basin, and strike inthe door just above his brother's head. This one did not lose aninstant; while the axe still quivered in the wood, he hurled himselfupon the drunkard, and did that justice on him which he would not askfrom the law, perhaps because it was a family affair; perhaps becausethose wretched men were no more under the law than the boys were. 

I do not mean that there was no law for the boys, for it was manifest totheir terror in two officers whom they knew as constables, and who mayhave reigned one after another, or together, with full power of life anddeath over them, as they felt; but who in a community mainly so peacefulacted upon Dogberry's advice, and made and meddled with rogues as littleas they could. From time to time it was known among the boys that youwould be taken up if you went in swimming inside of the corporationline, and for a while they would be careful to keep beyond it; but thiscould not last; they were soon back in the old places, and I suppose noarrests were ever really made. They did, indeed, hear once that OldGriffin, as they called him, caught a certain boy in the river beforedark, and carried him up through the town to his own home naked. Ofcourse no such thing ever happened; but the boys believed it, and itfroze my boy's soul with fear; all the more because this constable was acabinet-maker and made coffins; from his father's printing-office theboy could hear the long slide of his plane over the wood, and he couldsmell the varnish on the boards. 

I dare say Old Griffin was a kindly man enough, and not very old; and Isuppose that the other constable, as known to his family and friends, was not at all the gloomy headsman he appeared to the boys. When hebecame constable (they had not the least notion how a man becameconstable) they heard that his rule was to be marked by unwontedseverity against the crime of going in swimming inside the corporationline, and so they kept strictly to the letter of the law. But one daysome of them found themselves in the water beyond the First Lock, whenthe constable appeared on the tow-path, suddenly, as if he and his horsehad come up out of the ground. He told them that he had got them now, and he ordered them to come along with him; he remained there amusinghimself with their tears, their prayers, and then vanished again. Heavenknows how they lived through it; but they must have got safely home inthe usual way, and life must have gone on as before. No doubt the mandid not realize the torture he put them to; but it was a cruel thing;and I never have any patience with people who exaggerate a child'soffence to it, and make it feel itself a wicked criminal for some littleact of scarcely any consequence. If we elders stand here in the place ofthe Heavenly Father towards those younger children of His, He will nothold us guiltless when we obscure for them the important differencebetween a great and a small misdeed, or wring their souls, fear-cloudedas they always are, with a sense of perdition for no real sin. 

[Illustration: THE SIX-MILE LEVEL. ]

[Illustration: "HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW. "]

V. 

THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS. --OLD RIVER. 

THERE were two branches of the Hydraulic: one followed the course of theMiami, from some unknown point to the northward, on the level of itshigh bank, and joined the other where it emptied into the river justabove the bridge. This last came down what had been a street, and itmust have been very pretty to have these two swift streams of clearwater rushing through the little town, under the culverts, and betweenthe stone walls of its banks. But what a boy mainly cares for in a thingis _use_, and the boys tried to make some use of the Hydraulic, since itwas there to find what they could do with it. Of course they were awareof the mills dotted along its course, and they knew that it ran them;but I do not believe any of them thought that it was built merely to runflour-mills and saw-mills and cotton-mills. They did what they could tofind out its real use, but they could make very little of it. Thecurrent was so rapid that it would not freeze in winter, and in summerthey could not go in swimming in it by day, because it was so public, and at night the Basin had more attractions. There was danger of cuttingyour feet on the broken glass and crockery which people threw into theHydraulic, and though the edges of the culverts were good for jumpingoff of, the boys did not find them of much practical value. Sometimesyou could catch sunfish in the Hydraulic, but it was generally tooswift, and the only thing you could depend upon was catching crawfish. These abounded so that if you dropped a string with a bit of meat on itinto the water anywhere, you could pull it up again with two or threecrawfish hanging to it. The boys could not begin to use them all forbait, which was the only use their Creator seemed to have designed themfor; but they had vaguely understood that people somewhere ate them, orsomething like them, though they had never known even the name oflobsters; and they always intended to get their mothers to have themcooked for them. None of them ever did. 

They could sometimes, under high favor of fortune, push a dog into theHydraulic, or get him to jump in after a stick; and then have theexcitement of following him from one culvert to another, till he found afoothold and scrambled out. Once my boy saw a chicken cock sailingserenely down the currant; he was told that he had been given brandy, and that brandy would enable a chicken to swim; but probably this wasnot true. Another time, a tremendous time, a boy was standing at thebrink of a culvert, when one of his mates dared another to push him in. In those days the boys attached peculiar ideas of dishonor to taking adare. They said, and in some sort they believed, that a boy who wouldtake a dare would steal sheep. I do not now see why this should follow. In this case, the high spirit who was challenged felt nothing base inrunning up behind his unsuspecting friend and popping him into thewater, and I have no doubt the victim considered the affair in the rightlight when he found that it was a dare. He drifted under the culvert, and when he came out he swiftly scaled the wall below, and took afterthe boy who had pushed him in; of course this one had the start. Nogreat harm was done; everybody could swim, and a boy's summer costume inthat hot climate was made up of a shirt and trousers and a straw hat; noboy who had any regard for his social standing wore shoes or stockings, and as they were all pretty proud, they all went barefoot from Apriltill October. 

The custom of going barefoot must have come from the South, where itused to be so common, and also from the primitive pioneer times whichwere so near my boy's time, fifty years ago. The South characterized thethinking and feeling of the Boy's Town, far more than the North. Most ofthe people were of Southern extraction, from Kentucky or Virginia, whenthey were not from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. There might have beenother New England families, but the boys only knew of one--that of theblacksmith whose shop they liked to haunt. His children were heard todispute about an animal they had seen, and one of them said, "Tell ye'twa'n't a squeerrel; 'twas a maouse;" and the boys had that for aby-word. They despised Yankees as a mean-spirited race, who were stingyand would cheat; and would not hit you if you told them they lied. Aperson must always hit a person who told him he lied; but even if youcalled a Yankee a _fighting_ liar (the worst form of this insult), hewould not hit you, but just call you a liar back. My boy long acceptedthese ideas of New England as truly representative of the sectionalcharacter. Perhaps they were as fair as some ideas of the West which heafterwards found entertained in New England; but they were false andstupid all the same. 

If the boys could do little with the Hydraulic, they were at no loss inregard to the Reservoirs, into which its feeding waters were gatheredand held in reserve, I suppose, against a time of drought. There was theLittle Reservoir first, and then a mile beyond it the Big Reservoir, andthere was nearly always a large flat boat on each which was used forrepairing the banks, but which the boys employed as a pleasure-barge. Itseemed in some natural way to belong to them, and yet they had a feelingof something clandestine in pushing out on the Reservoir in it. Oncethey filled its broad, shallow hold with straw from a neighboringoatfield, and spent a long golden afternoon in simply lying under thehot September sun, in the middle of the Reservoir, and telling stories. My boy then learned, for the first time, that there was such a book asthe "Arabian Nights;" one of the other boys told stories out of it, andhe inferred that the sole copy in existence belonged to this boy. Heknew that they all had school-books alike, but it did not occur to himthat a book which was not a Reader or a Speller was ever duplicated. They did nothing with their boat except loll in it and tell stories, andas there was no current in the Reservoir, they must have remained prettymuch in the same place; but they had a sense of the wildest adventure, which mounted to frenzy, when some men rose out of the earth on theshore, and shouted at them, "Hello, there! What are you doing with thatboat?" They must have had an oar; at any rate, they got to the oppositebank, and, springing to land, fled somewhere into the vaguest past. 

The boys went in swimming in the Little Reservoir when they were not inthe River or the Basin; and they fished in the Big Reservoir, where thesunfish bit eagerly. There were large trees standing in the hollow whichbecame the bed of the Reservoir, and these died when the water was letin around them, and gave the stretch of quiet waters a strange, weirdlook; about their bases was the best kind of place for sunfish, and evenfor bass. Of course the boys never caught any bass; that honor wasreserved for men of the kind I have mentioned. It was several yearsbefore the catfish got in, and then they were mud-cats; but the boys hadgreat luck with sunfish there and in the pools about the flood-gates, where there was always some leakage, and where my boy once caught awhole string of live fish which had got away from some other boy, perhaps weeks before; they were all swimming about, in a lively way, andthe largest hungrily took his bait. The great pleasure of fishing inthese pools was that the waters were so clear you could see the fat, gleaming fellows at the bottom, nosing round your hook, and going offand coming back several times before they made up their minds to bite. It seems now impossible that my boy could ever have taken pleasure inthe capture of these poor creatures. I know that there are grown people, and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, andvalue themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only inboys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probablethat any lower organism

 "In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great As when a giant dies, "

but still, I believe that even a fish knows a dumb agony from the barbsof the hook which would take somewhat from the captor's joy if he couldbut realize it. 

[Illustration: "THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVEMENTIONED. "]

There was, of course, a time when the Hydraulic and the Reservoirs werenot where they afterwards appeared always to have been. My boy coulddimly recall the day when the water was first let into the Hydraulic, and the little fellows ran along its sides to keep abreast of thecurrent, as they easily could; and he could see more vividly the tumultwhich a break in the embankment of the Little Reservoir caused. Thewhole town rushed to the spot, or at least all the boys in it did, and agreat force of men besides, with shovels and wheelbarrows, and bundlesof brush and straw, and heavy logs, and heaped them into the crevasse, and piled earth on them. The men threw off their coats and all joined inthe work; a great local politician led off in his shirt-sleeves; and itwas as if my boy should now see the Emperor of Germany in hisshirt-sleeves pushing a wheelbarrow, so high above all other men hadthat exalted Whig always been to him. But the Hydraulic, I believe, wasa town work, and everybody felt himself an owner in it, and hoped toshare in the prosperity which it should bring to all. It made the peopleso far one family, as every public work which they own in common alwaysdoes; it made them brothers and equals, as private property never does. 

Of course the boys rose to no such conception of the fact before theireyes. I suspect that in their secret hearts they would have been glad tohave seen that whole embankment washed away, for the excitement's sake, and for the hope of catching the fish that would be left flopping at thebottom of the Reservoir when the waters were drained out, I think thatthese waters were brought somehow from Old River, but I am not surehow. Old River was very far away, and my boy was never there much, andknew little of the weird region it bounded. Once he went in swimming init, but the still, clear waters were strangely cold, and not like thoseof the friendly Miami. Once, also, when the boys had gone into the vastwoods of that measureless continent which they called the Island, forpawpaws or for hickory-nuts, or maybe buckeyes, they got lost; and whilethey ran about in terror, they heard the distant lowing and bellowing ofcattle. They knew somehow, as boys know everything, that the leader ofthe herd, which ranged those woods in a half-savage freedom, was avicious bull, and as the lowing and bellowing sounded nearer, theyhuddled together in the wildest dismay. Some were for running, some forgetting over a fence near by; but they could not tell which side of thefence the herd was on. In the primitive piety of childhood my boysuggested prayer as something that had served people in extremity, andhe believed that it was the only hope left. Another boy laughed, andbegan to climb a tree; the rest, who had received my boy's suggestionfavorably, instantly followed his example; in fact, he climbed a treehimself. The herd came slowly up, and when they reached the boys' refugethey behaved with all the fury that could have been expected--theytrampled and tossed the bags that held the pawpaws or buckeyes orhickory-nuts; they gored the trees where the boys hung trembling; theypawed and tossed the soft earth below; and then they must have goneaway, and given them up as hopeless. My boy never had the least notionhow he got home; and I dare say he was very young when he began theseexcursions to the woods. 

In some places Old River was a stagnant pool, covered with thick greenscum, and filled with frogs. The son of one of the tavern-keepers wasskilled in catching them, and I fancy supplied them to his father'stable; the important fact was his taking them, which he did by baiting acluster of three hooks with red flannel, and dropping them at the end ofa fish-line before a frog. The fated croaker plunged at the brilliantbait, and was caught in the breast; even as a small boy, my boy thoughtit a cruel sight. The boys pretended that the old frogs said, wheneverthis frog-catching boy came in sight, "Here comes Hawkins!--here comesHawkins! Look out!--look out!" and a row of boys, perched on a log inthe water, would sound this warning in mockery of the frogs or theirfoe, and plump one after another in the depths, as frogs follow theirleader in swift succession. They had nothing against Hawkins. They allliked him, for he was a droll, good-natured fellow, always up to somepleasantry. One day he laughed out in school. "Was that you laughed, Henry?" asked the teacher, with unerring suspicion. "I was only smiling, Mr. Slack. " "The next time, see that you don't smile so loud, " said Mr. Slack, and forgave him, as any one who saw his honest face must havewished to do. They called him Old Hawkins, for fondness; and while myboy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love withhim for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially withthe little boys. 

VI. 

SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. 

MY boy had not a great deal to do with schools after his docilechildhood. When he began to run wild with the other boys he preferredtheir savage freedom; and he got out of going to school by most of thedevices they used. He had never quite the hardihood to play truant, buthe was subject to sudden attacks of sickness, which came on aboutschool-time and went off towards the middle of the forenoon or afternoonin a very strange manner. I suppose that such complaints are unknown atthe present time, but the Young People's fathers can tell them how muchsuffering they used to cause among boys. At the age when my boy wasbeginning to outgrow them he was taken into his father'sprinting-office, and he completed his recovery and his education there. But all through the years when he lived in the Boy's Town he hadintervals of schooling, which broke in upon the swimming and theskating, of course, but were not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable. 

They began, as they are apt to do, with lessons in a private house, where a lady taught several other children, and where he possiblylearned to read; though he could only remember being set on a platformin punishment for some forgotten offence. After that he went to schoolin the basement of a church, where a number of boys and girls weretaught by a master who knew how to endear study at least to my boy. There was a garden outside of the schoolroom; hollyhocks grew in it, andthe boys gathered the little cheeses, as they called the seed-buttonswhich form when the flowers drop off, and ate them, because boys willeat anything, and not because they liked them. With the fact of thisgarden is mixed a sense of drowsy heat and summer light, and that isall, except the blackboard at the end of the room and a big girl doingsums at it; and the wonder why the teacher smiled when he read in one ofthe girls' compositions a phrase about forging puddings and pies; my boydid not know what forging meant, so he must have been very young. But hehad a zeal for learning, and somehow he took a prize in geography--ascience in which he was never afterwards remarkable. The prize was alittle history of Lexington, Mass. , which the teacher gave him, perhapsbecause Lexington may have been his native town; but the history musthave been very dryly told, for not a fact of it remained in the boy'smind. He was vaguely disappointed in the book, but he valued it for theteacher's sake whom he was secretly very fond of, and who had no doubtwon the child's heart by some flattering notice. He thought it a greathappiness to follow him, when the teacher gave up this school, and tookcharge of one of the public schools; but it was not the same there; theteacher could not distinguish him in that multitude of boys and girls. He did himself a little honor in spelling, but he won no praise, and hedisgraced himself then as always in arithmetic. He sank into the commonherd of mediocrities; and then, when his family went to live in anotherpart of the town, he began to go to another school. He had felt that theteacher belonged to him, and it must have been a pang to find him soestranged. But he was a kind man, and long afterwards he had a friendlysmile and word for the boy when they met; and then all at once he ceasedto be, as men and things do in a boy's world. 

The other school was another private school; and it was doubtless aschool of high grade in some things, for it was called the Academy. Butthere was provision for the youngest beginners in a lower room, and fora while my boy went there. Before school opened in the afternoon, thechildren tried to roast apples on the stove, but there never was time, and they had to eat them half raw. In the singing-class there was a boywho wore his hair so enviably long that he could toss it on his neck ashe wheeled in the march of the class round the room; his father kept astore and he brought candy to school. They sang "Scotland's burning!Pour on water" and "Home, home! Dearest and happiest home!" No doubtthey did other things, but none of them remained in my boy's mind; andwhen he was promoted to the upper room very little more was added. Hestudied Philosophy, as it was called, and he learned, as much from thepicture as the text, that you could not make a boat go by filling hersail from bellows on board; he did not see why. But he was chieflyconcerned with his fears about the Chemical Room, where I suppose somechemical apparatus must have been kept, but where the big boys weretaken to be whipped. It was a place of dreadful execution to him, andwhen he was once sent to the Chemical Boom, and shut up there, becausehe was crying, and because, as he explained, he could not stop cryingwithout a handkerchief, and he had none with him, he never expected tocome out alive. 

In fact, as I have said, he dwelt in a world of terrors; and I doubt ifsome of the big boys who were taken there to be whipped underwent somuch as he in being merely taken to the place where they had beenwhipped. At the same time, while he cowered along in the shadow ofunreal dangers, he had a boy's boldness with most of the real ones, andhe knew how to resent an indignity even at the hands of the teacher whocould send him to the Chemical Room at pleasure. He knew what belongedto him as a small boy of honor, and one thing was, not to be tamely putback from a higher to a lower place in his studies. I dare say that boysdo not mind this now; they must have grown ever so much wiser since myboy went to school; but in his time, when you were put back, say fromthe Third Reader to the Second Reader, you took your books and leftschool. That was what the other boys expected of you, and it was theonly thing for you to do if you had the least self-respect, for you wereput back to the Second Reader after having failed to read the Third, andit was a public shame which nothing but leaving that school could wipeout. The other boys would have a right to mock you if you did not do it;and as soon as the class was dismissed you went to your desk ashaughtily as you could, and began putting your books and your slate andyour inkstand together, with defiant glances at the teacher; and thenwhen twelve o'clock came, or four o'clock, and the school was let out, you tucked the bundle under your arm and marched out of the room, withas much majesty as could be made to comport with a chip hat and barefeet; and as you passed the teacher you gave a twist of the head thatwas meant to carry dismay to the heart of your enemy. I note all theseparticulars carefully, so as to show the boys of the present day whatfools the boys of the past were; though I think they will hardly believeit. My boy was once that kind of fool; but not twice. He left schoolwith all his things at twelve o'clock, and he returned with them at one;for his father and mother did not agree with him about the teacher'sbehavior in putting him back. No boy's father and mother agreed with himon this point; every boy returned in just the same way; but somehow theinsult had been wiped out by the mere act of self-assertion, and a boykept his standing in the world as he could never have done if he had notleft school when he was put back. 

The Hydraulic ran alongside of the Academy, and at recess the boys had agood deal of fun with it, one way and another, sailing shingles withstones on them, and watching them go under one end of the culvert andcome out of the other, or simply throwing rocks into the water. It doesnot seem very exciting when you tell of it, but it really was exciting;though it was not so exciting as to go down to the mills, where theHydraulic plunged over that great wheel into the Miami. A foot-bridgecrossed it that you could jump up and down on and almost make touch thewater, and there were happier boys, who did not go to school, fishingthere with men who had never gone. Sometimes the schoolboys venturedinside of the flour-mill and the iron-foundry, but I do not think thiswas often permitted; and, after all, the great thing was to rush over tothe river-bank, all the boys and girls together, and play with theflutter-mills till the bell rang. The market-house was not far off, andthey went there sometimes when it was not market-day, and played amongthe stalls; and once a girl caught her hand on a meat-hook. My boy had avision of her hanging from it; but this was probably one of those grislyfancies that were always haunting him, and no fact at all. The bridgewas close by the market-house, but for some reason or no reason thechildren never played in the bridge. Perhaps the toll-house man wouldnot let them; my boy stood in dread of the toll-house man; he seemed tohave such a severe way of taking the money from the teamsters. 

Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boydid not know what that meant; in his own mind he could not disentanglethe idea of bows from the idea of arrows; but he was in love with thegirl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much onaccount of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him themost beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes fromhis ridiculous little heart. While he was still a boy of ten he heardthat she was married; and she must have been a great deal older than he. In fact he was too small a boy when he went to the Academy to rememberhow long he went there, and whether it was months or years; but probablyit was not more than a year. He stopped going there because the teachergave up the school to become a New Church minister; and as my boy'sfather and mother were New Church people, there must have been someintimacy between them and the teacher, which he did not know of. But heonly stood in awe, not terror, of him; and he was not surprised when hemet him many long years after, to find him a man peculiarly wise, gentle, and kind. Between the young and the old there is a vast gulf, seldom if ever bridged. The old can look backward over it, but theycannot cross it, any more than the young, who can see no thither side. 

The next school my boy went to was a district school, as they called apublic school in the Boy's Town. He did not begin going there withoutsomething more than his usual fear and trembling; for he had heard freeschools and pay schools talked over among the boys, and sharplydistinguished: in a pay school the teacher had only such powers ofwhipping as were given him by the parents, and they were always strictlylimited; in a free school the teacher whipped as much and as often as heliked. For this reason it was much better to go to a pay school; but youhad more fun at a free school, because there were more fellows; you mustbalance one thing against another. The boy who philosophized the matterin this way was a merry, unlucky fellow, who fully tested the advantagesand disadvantages of the free-school system. He was one of thebest-hearted boys in the world, and the kindest to little boys; he wasalways gay and always in trouble, and forever laughing, when he was notcrying under that cruel rod. Sometimes he would not cry; but when he wascaught in one of his frequent offences and called up before theteacher's desk in the face of the whole school, and whipped over histhinly jacketed shoulders, he would take it without wincing, and gosmiling to his seat, and perhaps be called back and whipped more forsmiling. He was a sort of hero with the boys on this account, but he wastoo kind-hearted to be proud, and mingled with the rest on equal terms. One awful day, just before school took up in the afternoon, he andanother boy went for a bucket of drinking-water; it always took twoboys. They were gone till long after school began, and when they cameback the teacher called them up, and waited for them to arrive slowly athis desk while he drew his long, lithe rod through his left hand. Theyhad to own that they had done wrong, and they had no excuse but the onea boy always has--they forgot. He said he must teach them not to forget, and their punishment began; surely the most hideous and depraving sight, except a hanging, that could be offered to children's eyes. One of themhowled and shrieked, and leaped and danced, catching his back, his arms, his legs, as the strokes rained upon him, imploring, promising, andgetting away at last with a wild effort to rub himself all over all atonce. When it came the hero's turn, he bore it without a murmur, and asif his fortitude exasperated him, the teacher showered the blows moreswiftly and fiercely upon him than before, till a tear or two did stealdown the boy's cheek. Then he was sent to his seat, and in a few minuteshe was happy with a trap for catching flies which he had contrived inhis desk. 

No doubt they were an unruly set of boys, and I do not suppose theteacher was a hard man, though he led the life of an executioner, andseldom passed a day without inflicting pain that a fiend might shrinkfrom giving. My boy lived in an anguish of fear lest somehow he shouldcome under that rod of his; but he was rather fond of the teacher, andso were all the boys. The teacher took a real interest in their studies, and if he whipped them well, he taught them well; and at most times hewas kind and friendly with them. Anyway, he did not blister your handwith a ruler, as some teachers did, or make you stand bent forward fromthe middle, with your head hanging down, so that the blood all ran intoit. Under him my boy made great advances in reading and writing, and hewon some distinction in declamation; but the old difficulties with thearithmetic remained. He failed to make anything out of the parts ofspeech in his grammar; but one afternoon, while he sat in his stockingfeet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have fromhis snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he foundsomething in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about thepain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses;explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas--everything that hadpuzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his fatherread aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a scienceexisted, and yet here it was printed out, with each principle reduced topractice. He conceived of its reasons at the first reading, so that Isuppose nature had not dealt so charily with him concerning the rules ofprosody as the rules of arithmetic; and he lost no time in applying themin a poem of his own. The afternoon air was heavy with the heat thatquivered visibly above the great cast-iron wood stove in the centre ofthe schoolroom; the boys drowsed in their seats, or hummed sleepily overtheir lessons; the chilblains gnawed away at the poet's feet, but heavenhad opened to him, and he was rapt far from all the world of sense. Themusic which he had followed through those poems his father read was nolonger a mystery; he had its key, its secret; he might hope to wield itscharm, to lay its spell upon others. He wrote his poem, which wasprobably a simple, unconscious imitation of something that had pleasedhim in his school-reader, and carried it proudly home with him. Buthere he met with that sort of disappointment which more than any otherdismays and baffles authorship; a difference in the point of view. Hisfather said the verses were well made, and he sympathized with him inhis delight at having found out the way to make them, though he was notso much astonished as the boy that such a science as prosody shouldexist. He praised the child's work, and no doubt smiled at it with themother; but he said that the poem spoke of heaven as a place in the sky, and he wished him always to realize that heaven was a _state_ and not a_place_, and that we could have it in this world as well as the next. The boy promised that he would try to realize heaven as a state; but atthe bottom of his heart he despaired of getting that idea into poetry. Everybody else who had made poetry spoke of heaven as a place; they evencalled it a land, and put it in the sky; and he did not see how he wasto do otherwise, no matter what Swedenborg said. He revered Swedenborg;he had a religious awe of the seer's lithograph portrait in afull-bottom wig which hung in the front-room, but he did not see howeven Swedenborg could have helped calling heaven a place if he had beenmaking poetry. 

The next year, or the next quarter, maybe, there was a new teacher; theyseem to have followed each other somewhat as people do in a dream; theywere not there, and then they were there; but, however the new one came, the boys were some time in getting used to his authority. It appeared tothem that several of his acts were distinctly tyrannical, and wereencroachments upon rights of theirs which the other teacher, with allhis severity, had respected. My boy was inspired by the common mood towrite a tragedy which had the despotic behavior of the new teacher forits subject, and which was intended to be represented by the boys in thehayloft of a boy whose father had a stable without any horse in it. Thetragedy was written in the measure of the "Lady of the Lake, " which wasthe last poem my boy had heard his father reading aloud; it was veryeasy kind of verse. At the same time, the boys were to be dressed asRoman conspirators, and one of them was to give the teacher a petitionto read, while another plunged a dagger into his vitals, and stillanother shouted, "Strike, Stephanos, strike!" It seemed to my boy thathe had invented a situation which he had lifted almost bodily out ofGoldsmith's history; and he did not feel that his lines, "Come one, come all! This rock shall flee From its firm base as soon as we, "

were too closely modelled upon Scott's lines, "Come one, come all! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I. "

The tragedy was never acted. There may have been some trouble about thehayloft; for the boy whose father owned the stable was to have got theuse of it without his father's knowing it; and the poet found that theboys themselves scarcely entered into the spirit of his work. But afterthat there came a real tragedy, which most of them had part in withoutrealizing it, and that was their persecution of a teacher until he hadto give up the school. He must have come next after that usurper, but atany rate the word had been passed round, even before school took up thefirst morning he began, that he was to be resisted to the death. Hecould not have had any notion of what was in the air, for in thatopening speech to the school which a new teacher always used to make, hetalked to the boys in the friendliest manner, and with more sense andreason than they could feel, though I hope they felt some secret shamefor the way they meant to behave. He took up some old, dry rods, whichhe had lying on his desk, and which he said he had found in it, and hetold them he hoped never to use such a thing as a rod in that school, and never to strike any boy a blow. He broke the rods into small piecesand put them into the stove, and called the school to order for thestudies before it. But the school never came to order, either then orafterwards. As soon as the teacher took his seat, the whispering andgiggling, the scuffling and pushing began. The boys passed notes to thegirls and held up their slates with things written on them to make thegirls laugh; and they threw chewed-paper balls at one another. Theyasked to go out, and they stayed out as long as they pleased, and cameback with an easy air, as if they had done nothing. They would notstudy; they did not care how much they missed in the class, and theylaughed when they had to go to the foot. They made faces at the teacherand mocked him when his back was turned; they even threw paper wads athim. 

It went on day after day till the school became a babel. The teachertried reasoning, and such mild punishment as standing up in the middleof the floor, and keeping in after school. One big boy whom he stood upwinked at the girls and made everybody titter; another whom he bade stayafter school grabbed his hat and ran out of the room. The fellows playedhookey as much as they wanted to, and did not give any excuse for beinglate, or for not coming at all. At last, when the teacher was drivendesperate, and got in a rod (which he said he was ashamed to use, butthey left him no hope of ruling them by reason), the big boys foughthim, and struck back when he began to whip them. This gentle soul hadnot one friend among all those little savages, whom he had given nocause to hate, but only cause to love him. None of them could have toldwhy they used him so ill, for nobody knew; only, the word had gone outthat you were not to mind him, but to mock him and fight him; nobodyknew where the word first came from. 

Not even my boy, I grieve to say, was the poor man's friend, though hetoo had received only kindness from him. One day, when the teacher hadset him his copy, and found him doing it badly as he came by, he gavehim a slight tap on his head with his penknife, and addressed him somehalf-joking reproof. This fired my boy's wicked little heart withfurious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took themhome; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling. He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parentsbehaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose merepresence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows, brought his son in after such an escapade, and told the teacher that hehad just given him a sound thrashing, and he hoped the teacher wouldgive him another. But the teacher took the hand of the snivellingwretch, and called him affectionately by name, and said they would tryto get along without that, and sent him to his seat forgiven. It oughtto have touched a heart of stone, but in that barbarous republic of boysthere was no gratitude. Sometimes they barred the teacher out bynailing the doors and windows; and at last he gave up the school. 

But even then his persecution did not end. The word went out that youwere not to speak to him if you met him; and if he spoke to you, youwere not to say anything back. One day he came up to my boy where he satfishing for crawfish in the Hydraulic, with his bare legs dangling overthe edge of a culvert, and, unawed by this august figure, asked himpleasantly what luck he had. The boy made no sign of seeing or hearinghim, and he ignored some other kindly advances. I hope the teacherthought it merely his shyness. The boy went home and told, gleefully, how he had refused to speak to Old Manton; but here he met his reward. He was made to feel how basely rude he had been, and to tingle with awholesome shame. There was some talk of sending him to the teacher, toask his forgiveness; but this was given up for fear of inflicting painwhere possibly none had been felt. I wish now the boy could have gone tohim, for perhaps the teacher is no longer living. 

VII. 

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. 

I SOMETIMES wonder how much these have changed since my boy's time. Ofcourse they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from Eastto West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown peopleare apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside ofthe laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwrittenusages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on thesame level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but arebinding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boysbetween six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losinghis standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their worldwithout coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; heobeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages fromwhom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in andthrough the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into itany more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its ownideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, adepravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity thatfathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and itis only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on init. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly;and in the meanwhile it is only in some of its milder manners andcustoms that the boy's world can be studied. 

The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through anotherboy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself uponhis person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hopeto revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for thattime, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell theteacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outsideof the boys' world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor orself-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would havethe right to mock you, to point at you, and call "E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!"at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them ornot there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had tostop. 

Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a newneighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason forthis, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no othermeans of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he becamesubject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in thelast century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him intotheir tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away froma neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not haveto fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one ofthem met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusionswith him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit ofwhipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy's family leftthe Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to seehim at the Falconer house, and tried to carry things with a high hand, as he had always done. Then my boy fought him, quite as if he were not aDelaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights overhim. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not beenon new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. Hismother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for hisbehavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over somesugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhoodunderstood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The homeinstruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was notonly wicked, but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just aswrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. Butall this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trialsand perplexities of life in the Boy's Town. 

There were some boys of such standing as bullies and such wide fame thatthey could range all neighborhoods of the town not only without fear ofbeing molested, or made to pass under the local yoke anywhere, but withsuch plenary powers of intimidation that the other boys submitted tothem without question. My boy had always heard of one of these bullies, whose very name, Buz Simpson, carried terror with it; but he had neverseen him, because he lived in the unknown region bordering on the riversouth of the Thomas house. One day he suddenly appeared, when my boy wasplaying marbles with some other fellows in front of the Falconer house, attended by two or three other boys from below the Sycamore Grove. Hewas small and insignificant, but such was the fear his name inspiredthat my boy and his friends cowered before him, though some of them wereno mean fighters themselves. They seemed to know by instinct that thiswas Buz Simpson, and they stood patiently by while he kicked theirmarbles out of the ring and broke up their game, and, after stayingawhile to cover them with ignominy and insult, passed on with hisretainers to other fields of conquest. If it had been death to resisthim, they could not have dreamed less of doing so; and though thisoutrage took place under my boy's own windows, and a single word wouldhave brought efficient aid (for the mere sight of any boy's mother couldput to flight a whole army of other boys), he never dreamed of callingfor help. 

That would have been a weakness which would not only have marked himforever as a cry-baby, but an indecorum too gross for words. It wouldhave been as if, when once the boys were playing trip at school, and abig boy tripped him, and he lay quivering and panting on the ground, hehad got up as soon as he could catch his breath and gone in and told theteacher; or as if, when the fellows were playing soak-about, and he gothit in the pit of the stomach with a hard ball, he had complained of thefellow who threw it. There were some things so base that a boy could notdo them; and what happened out of doors, and strictly within the boy'sworld, had to be kept sacredly secret among the boys. For instance, ifyou had been beguiled, as a little boy, into being the last in the gameof snap-the-whip, and the snap sent you rolling head over heels on thehard ground, and skinned your nose and tore your trousers, you could cryfrom the pain without disgrace, and some of the fellows would come upand try to comfort you; but you were bound in honor not to appeal to theteacher, and you were expected to use every device to get the blood offyou before you went in, and to hide the tear in your trousers. Ofcourse, the tear and the blood could not be kept from the anxious eyesat home, but even there you were expected not to say just what boys didit. 

They were by no means the worst boys who did such things, but only themost thoughtless. Still, there was a public opinion in the Boy's Townwhich ruled out certain tricks, and gave the boys who played them thename of being "mean. " One of these was boring a hole in the edge of yourschool-desk to meet a shaft sunk from the top, which you filled withslate-pencil dust. Then, if you were that kind of boy, you got somelittle chap to put his eye close to the shaft, with the hope of seeingNiagara Falls, and set your lips to the hole in the edge, and blew hiseye full of pencil-dust. This was mean; and it was also mean to get someunsuspecting child to close the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb, and look hard at you, while you showed him Germany. You did this bypulling a string below the tube, and running a needle into his thumb. Myboy discovered Germany in this way long before he had any geographicalor political conception of it. 

I do not know why, if these abominable cruelties were thought mean, itwas held lawful to cover a stone with dust and get a boy, not in thesecret, to kick the pile over with his bare foot. It was perfectly goodform, also, to get a boy, if you could, to shut his eyes, and then leadhim into a mud-puddle or a thicket of briers or nettles, or to fool himin any heartless way, such as promising to pump easy when he put hismouth to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with arush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide fromhis nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted becausethe sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure infighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying theirnests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you couldfool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead themoff in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there wereother cases in which deceit was not allowable. For instance, if youappeared on the playground with an apple, and all the boys came whoopinground, "You know _me_, Jimmy!" "You know your uncle!" "You know yourgrandfather!" and you began to sell out bites at three pins for alady-bite and six pins for a hog-bite, and a boy bought a lady-bite andthen took a hog-bite, he was held in contempt, and could by no meanspass it off for a good joke on you; it was considered mean. 

In the Boy's Town there was almost as much stone-throwing as there wasin Florence in the good old times. There was a great abundance of thefinest kind of pebbles, from the size of a robin's egg upward, smoothand shapely, which the boys called rocks. They were always stoningsomething, birds, or dogs, or mere inanimate marks, but most of the timethey were stoning one another. They came out of their houses, orfront-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly goodterms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day. Theystoned a boy who left a group singly, and it was lawful for him to throwstones back at the rest, if the whim took him, when he got a little wayoff. With all this stone-throwing, very little harm was done, though nowand then a stone took a boy on the skull, and raised a lump of its ownsize. Then the other boys knew, by the roar of rage and pain he set up, that he had been hit, and ran home and left him to his fate. 

Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, andconducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning thefights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knewhow to box, and all the fellows intended to learn, but nobody ever did. The fights sprang usually out of some trouble of the moment; but attimes they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physicalsuperiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the otherto knock it off. It took a great while to bring the champions to blows, and I have known the mere preparatory insults of a fight of this kind towear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of thespectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affairfell through. 

Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boywent with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they wouldhave scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned toplay with one. Of course while they were very little they played withgirls; and after they began to be big boys, eleven or twelve years old, they began to pay girls some attention; but for the rest they simplyleft them out of the question, except at parties, when the gamesobliged them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, itwas not good form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he hadto conceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless hewanted to be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were havingfun they did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard aboy might play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sistersand their friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such thingswere not encouraged. On the other hand, a boy was bound to defend themagainst anything that he thought slighting or insulting; and you did nothave to verify the fact that anything had been said or done; you merelyhad to hear that it had. It once fell to my boy to avenge such areported wrong from a boy who had not many friends in school, a timidcreature whom the mere accusation frightened half out of his wits, andwho wildly protested his innocence. He ran, and my boy followed with theother boys after him, till they overtook the culprit and brought him tobay against a high board fence; and there my boy struck him in hisimploring face. He tried to feel like a righteous champion, but he feltlike a brutal ruffian. He long had the sight of that terrified, weepingface, and with shame and sickness of heart he cowered before it. It waspretty nearly the last of his fighting; and though he came off victor, he felt that he would rather be beaten himself than do another such actof justice. In fact, it seems best to be very careful how we try to dojustice in this world, and mostly to leave retribution of all kinds toGod, who really knows about things; and content ourselves as much aspossible with mercy, whose mistakes are not so irreparable. 

The boys had very little to do with the inside of one another's houses. They would follow a boy to his door, and wait for him to come out; andthey would sometimes get him to go in and ask his mother for crullers orsugar-cakes; when they came to see him they never went indoors for him, but stood on the sidewalk and called him with a peculiar cry, somethinglike "E-oo-we, e-oo-we!" and threw stones at trees, or anything, till hecame out. If he did not come, after a reasonable time, they knew he wasnot there, or that his mother would not let him come. A fellow was keptin that way, now and then. If a fellow's mother came to the door theboys always ran. 

The mother represented the family sovereignty; the father was seldomseen, and he counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. Itwas the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing or inswimming, and she was held a good mother or not according as shehabitually said yes or no. There was no other standard of goodness formothers in the boy's world, and could be none; and a bad mother might beoutwitted by any device that the other boys could suggest to her boy. Such a boy was always willing to listen to any suggestion, and no boytook it hard if the other fellows made fun when their plan got him intotrouble at home. If a boy came out after some such experience with hisface wet, and his eyes red, and his lips swollen, of course you had tolaugh; he expected it, and you expected him to stone you for laughing. 

When a boy's mother had company, he went and hid till the guests weregone, or only came out of concealment to get some sort of shy lunch. Ifthe other fellows' mothers were there, he might be a little bolder, andbring out cake from the second table. But he had to be pretty carefulhow he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society. A fellow whobrushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came into the parlor when therewas company, was not well seen among the fellows; he was regarded insome degree as a girl-boy; a boy who wished to stand well with otherboys kept in the wood-shed, and only went in as far as the kitchen toget things for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers whowould make a boy put on a collar when they had company, and disgrace himbefore the world by making him stay round and help; they acted as ifthey had no sense and no pity; but such mothers were rare. 

Most mothers yielded to public opinion and let their boys leave thehouse, and wear just what they always wore. I have told how little theywore in summer. Of course in winter they had to put on more things. Inthose days knickerbockers were unknown, and if a boy had appeared inshort pants and long stockings he would have been thought dressed like acircus-actor. Boys wore long pantaloons, like men, as soon as they putoff skirts, and they wore jackets or roundabouts such as the Englishboys still wear at Eton. When the cold weather came they had to put onshoes and stockings, or rather long-legged boots, such as are seen nowonly among lumbermen and teamsters in the country. Most of the fellowshad stoga boots, as heavy as iron and as hard; they were splendid toskate in, they kept your ankles so stiff. Sometimes they greased them tokeep the water out; but they never blacked them except on Sunday, andbefore Saturday they were as red as a rusty stove-pipe. At night theywere always so wet that you could not get them off without a boot-jack, and you could hardly do it anyway; sometimes you got your brother tohelp you off with them, and then he pulled you all round the room. Inthe morning they were dry, but just as hard as stone, and you had tosoap the heel of your woollen sock (which your grandmother had knittedfor you, or maybe some of your aunts) before you could get your foot in, and sometimes the ears of the boot that you pulled it on by would giveway, and you would have to stamp your foot in and kick the toe againstthe mop-board. Then you gasped and limped round, with your feet likefire, till you could get out and limber your boots up in some watersomewhere. About noon your chilblains began. 

My boy had his secret longing to be a dandy, and once he was so takenwith a little silk hat at the hat-store that he gave his father no peacetill he got it for him. But the very first time he wore it the boys madefun of it, and that was enough. After that he wore it several times withstreaming tears; and then he was allowed to lay it aside, and compromiseon an unstylish cap of velvet, which he had despised before. I do notknow why a velvet cap was despised, but it was; a cap with a tassel wasbabyish. The most desired kind of cap was a flat one of blue broadcloth, with a patent-leather peak, and a removable cover of oil-cloth, silk ifyou were rich, cotton if you were poor; when you had pulled the top ofsuch a cap over on one side, you were dressed for conquest, especiallyif you wore your hair long. My boy had such a cap, with a silk oil-clothcover, but his splendor was marred by his short hair. 

At one time boots with long, sharp-pointed toes were the fashion, and heso ardently desired a pair of these that fate granted his prayer, butin the ironical spirit which fate usually shows when granting a person'sprayers. These boots were of calf-skin, and they had red leather tops, which you could show by letting your pantaloon-legs carelessly catch onthe ears; but the smallest pair in town was several sizes too large formy boy. The other boys were not slow to discover the fact, and hismartyrdom with these boots began at once. But he was not allowed to givethem up as he did the silk hat; he had to wear them out. However, it didnot take long to wear out a pair of boots in the Boy's Town. A fewweeks' scuffling over the gravelly ground, or a single day's steadysliding made them the subjects for half-soling, and then it was aquestion of only a very little time. 

A good many of the boys, though, wore their boots long after they wereworn out, and so they did with the rest of their clothes. I have triedto give some notion of the general distribution of comfort which wasnever riches in the Boy's Town; but I am afraid that I could not paintthe simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood inthese days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twentythousand dollars. There were distinctions among the grown people, and nodoubt there were the social cruelties which are the modern expression ofthe savage spirit otherwise repressed by civilization; but these wereunknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages. They valued a boy for his character and prowess, and it did not matterin the least that he was ragged and dirty. Their mothers might not allowhim the run of their kitchens quite so freely as some other boys, butthe boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how littlehe was washed and dressed. The best of them had not an overcoat; andunderclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up hisroundabout, and put on his mittens, and tied his comforter round hisneck and over his ears, he was warmly dressed. 

VIII. 

PLAYS AND PASTIMES. 

ABOUT the time fate cursed him with a granted prayer in those boots, myboy was deep in the reading of a book about Grecian mythology which hefound perpetually fascinating; he read it over and over without everthinking of stopping merely because he had already been through ittwenty or thirty times. It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their variouscharacters and exploits. But Apollo was his favorite, and I believe itwas with some hope of employing them in a personation of the god that hecoveted those red-topped sharp-toed calf-skin boots. He had a notionthat if he could get up a chariot by sawing down the sides of astore-box for the body, and borrowing the hind-wheels of the baby'swillow wagon, and then, drawn by the family dog Tip at a mad gallop, come suddenly whirling round the corner of the school-house, wearingspangled circus-tights and bearing Apollo's bow and shaft, while asilken scarf which he had seen in a bureau-drawer at home blew gallantlyout behind him, it would have a fine effect with the boys. Some of thefellows wished to be highway robbers and outlaws; one who intended to bea pirate afterwards got so far in a maritime career as to invent asteam-engine governor now in use on the seagoing steamers; my boy wascontent to be simply a god, the god of poetry and sunshine. He neverrealized his modest ambition, but then boys never realize anything;though they have lots of fun failing. 

[Illustration: "A CITIZEN'S CHARACTER FOR CLEVERNESS OR MEANNESS WASFIXED BY HIS WALKING ROUND OR OVER THE RINGS. "]

In the Boy's Town they had regular games and plays, which came and wentin a stated order. The first thing in the spring as soon as the frostbegan to come out of the ground, they had marbles which they played tillthe weather began to be pleasant for the game, and then they left itoff. There were some mean-spirited fellows who played for fun, but anyboy who was anything played for keeps: that is, keeping all the marbleshe won. As my boy was skilful at marbles, he was able to start out inthe morning with his toy, or the marble he shot with, and a commy, or abrown marble of the Lowest value, and come home at night with apocketful of white-alleys and blood-alleys, striped plasters findbull's-eyes, and crystals, clear and clouded. His gambling was notapproved of at home, but it was allowed him because of the hardness ofhis heart, I suppose, and because it was not thought well to keep him uptoo strictly; and I suspect it would have been useless to forbid hisplaying for keeps, though he came to have a bad conscience about itbefore he gave it up. There were three kinds of games at marbles whichthe boys played: one with a long ring marked out on the ground, and abase some distance off, which you began to shoot from; another with around ring, whose line formed the base; and another with holes, three orfive, hollowed in the earth at equal distances from each other, whichwas called knucks. You could play for keeps in all these games; and inknucks, if you won, you had a shot or shots at the knuckles of thefellow who lost, and who was obliged to hold them down for you to shootat. Fellows who were mean would twitch their knuckles away when they sawyour toy coming, and run; but most of them took their punishment withthe savage pluck of so many little Sioux. As the game began in the rawcold of the earliest spring, every boy had chapped hands, and nearlyevery one had the skin worn off the knuckle of his middle finger fromresting it on the ground when he shot. You could use a knuckle-dabsterof fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but it was considered effeminate, and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway. Marbles werealways very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as thatof a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up: whethera boy took-up or edged beyond the very place where his toy lay when heshot; whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground inshooting; whether, when another boy's toy drove one marble againstanother and knocked both out of the ring, he holloed "Fen doubs!" beforethe other fellow holloed "Doubs!" whether a marble was in or out of thering, and whether the umpire's decision was just or not. The gamblingand the quarrelling went on till the second-bell rang for school, andbegan again as soon as the boys could get back to their rings whenschool let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with astick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy, the side of a fellow's boot would do, and the hollows for knucks werealways bored by twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy towear out his boots very rapidly, but that was what his boots were madefor, just as the sidewalks were made for the boys' marble-rings, and acitizen's character for cleverness or meanness was fixed by hiswalking round or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginiasense for amiability; a person who was clever in the English sense wassmart. 

There were many games of ball. Two-cornered cat was played by four boys:two to bat, and two behind the batters to catch and pitch. Three-cornered cat was, I believe, the game which has since grown intobase-ball, and was even then sometimes called so. But soak-about was thefavorite game at school, and it simply consisted of hitting any otherboy you could with the ball when you could get it. Foot-ball was alwaysplayed with a bladder, and it came in season with the cold weather whenthe putting up of beef began; the business was practically regarded bythe boys as one undertaken to supply them with bladders for foot-balls. 

When the warm weather came on in April, and the boys got off their shoesfor good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Lifehas a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none soecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast ofour mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then fromthe heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, andcousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees. His blood leapsas wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into their armsin June; there is something even finer and sweeter in the rapture of theearlier bliss. The day will not be long enough for his flights, hisraces; he aches more with regret than with fatigue when he must leavethe happy paths under the stars outside, and creep into his bed. It isall like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time when theearth and her sons shall be reconciled in a deathless love, and theyshall not be thankless, nor she a step-mother any more. 

About the only drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, whichyou were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and beforeyou had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toeagainst a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hoppedabout a hundred yards before you could bear to put it to the ground. Then you sat down, and held it as tight as you could, and cried over it, till the fellows helped you to the pump to wash the blood off. Then, assoon as you could, you limped home for a rag, and kept pretty quietabout it so as to get out again without letting on to your mother. 

With the races came the other plays which involved running, likehide-and-go-whoop, and tag, and dog-on-wood, and horse, which I dare saythe boys of other times and other wheres know by different names. TheSmith-house neighborhood was a famous place for them all, both becausethere were such lots of boys, and because there were so many sheds andstables where you could hide, and everything. There was a town pumpthere for you, so that you would not have to go into the house for adrink when you got thirsty, and perhaps be set to doing something; andthere were plenty of boards for teeter and see-saw; and somehow thatneighborhood seemed to understand boys, and did not molest them in anyway. In a vacant lot behind one of the houses there was a whirligig, that you could ride on and get sick in about a minute; it was splendid. There was a family of German boys living across the street, that youcould stone whenever they came out of their front gate, for the simpleand sufficient reason that they were Dutchmen, and without going to thetrouble of a quarrel with them. My boy was not allowed to stone them;but when he was with the other fellows, and his elder brother was notalong, he could not help stoning them. 

There were shade trees all along that street, that you could climb ifyou wanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had runyourself out of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctlyremembered that under one of these trees his elder brother firstbroached to him that awful scheme of reform about fibbing, and appliedto their own lives the moral of "The Trippings of Tom Pepper;" heremembered how a conviction of the righteousness of the scheme sank intohis soul, and he could not withhold his consent. Under the same tree, and very likely at the same time, a solemn conclave of boys, all theboys there were, discussed the feasibility of tying a tin can to a dog'stail, and seeing how he would act. They had all heard of the thing, butnone of them had seen it; and it was not so much a question of whetheryou ought to do a thing that on the very face of it would be so muchfun, and if it did not amuse the dog as highly as anybody, couldcertainly do him no harm, as it was a question of whose dog you shouldget to take the dog's part in the sport. It was held that an old dogwould probably not keep still long enough for you to tie the can on; hewould have his suspicions; or else he would not run when the can wastied on, but very likely just go and lie down somewhere. The lot finallyfell to a young yellow dog belonging to one of the boys, and the ownerat once ran home to get him, and easily lured him back to the other boyswith flatteries and caresses. The flatteries and caresses were notneeded, for a dog is always glad to go with boys, upon any pretext, andso far from thinking that he does them a favor, he feels himself greatlyhonored. But I dare say the boy had a guilty fear that if his dog hadknown why he was invited to be of that party of boys, he might havepleaded a previous engagement. As it was, he came joyfully, and allowedthe can to be tied to his tail without misgiving. If there had been anyquestion with the boys as to whether he would enter fully into thespirit of the affair, it must have been instantly dissipated by thedog's behavior when he felt the loop tighten on his tail, and lookedround to see what the matter was. The boys hardly had a chance to cheerhim before he flashed out of sight round the corner, and they hardly hadtime to think before he flashed into sight again from the otherdirection. He whizzed along the ground, and the can hurtled in the air, but there was no other sound, and the cheers died away on the boys'lips. The boy who owned the dog began to cry, and the other fellowsbegan to blame him for not stopping the dog. But he might as well havetried to stop a streak of lightning; the only thing you could do was tokeep out of the dog's way. As an experiment it was successful beyond thewildest dreams of its projectors, though it would have been a sort ofrelief if the dog had taken some other road, for variety, or had evenreversed his course. But he kept on as he began, and by a common impulsethe boys made up their minds to abandon the whole affair to him. Theyall ran home and hid, or else walked about and tried to ignore it. Butat this point the grown-up people began to be interested; the motherscame to their doors to see what was the matter. Yet even the motherswere powerless in a case like that, and the enthusiast had to be leftto his fate. He was found under a barn at last, breathless, almostlifeless, and he tried to bite the man who untied the can from his tail. Eventually he got well again, and lived to be a solemn warning to theboys; he was touchingly distrustful of their advances for a time, but hefinally forgot and forgave everything. They did not forget, and theynever tried tying a tin can to a dog's tail again, among all the thingsthey tried and kept trying. Once was enough; and they never even likedto talk of it, the sight was so awful. They were really fond of the dog, and if they could have thought he would take the matter so seriously, they would not have tried to have that kind of fun with him. It curedthem of ever wanting to have that kind of fun with any dog. 

As the weather softened, tops came in some weeks after marbles went out, and just after foot-races were over, and a little before swimming began. At first the boys bought their tops at the stores, but after a while theboy whose father had the turning-shop on the Hydraulic learned to turntheir tops, and did it for nothing, which was cheaper than buying tops, especially as he furnished the wood, too, and you only had to get thewire peg yourself. I believe he was the same boy who wanted to be apirate and ended by inventing a steam-governor. He was very ingenious, and he knew how to turn a top out of beech or maple that would outspinanything you could get in a store. The boys usually chose a firm, smoothpiece of sidewalk, under one of the big trees in the Smith neighborhood, and spun their tops there. A fellow launched his top into the ring, andthe rest waited till it began to go to sleep, that is, to settle in oneplace, and straighten up and spin silently, as if standing still. Thenany fellow had a right to peg at it with his top, and if he hit it, hewon it; and if he split it, as sometimes happened, the fellow that ownedit had to give him a top. The boys came with their pockets bulged outwith tops, but before long they had to go for more tops to that boy whocould turn them. From this it was but another step to go to the shopwith him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process oftime the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a betterplace to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would havegiven whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloingtoo loudly the boy's father would come up, and then they would all run. It was considered mean in him, but the boy himself was awfully clever, and the first thing the fellows knew they were back there again. Somefew of the boys had humming-tops; but though these pleased by theirnoise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against thegood old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind upwith a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flatbutton held between your fore finger and middle finger. Some of the boyshad a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could controlits course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of abase-ball. 

I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows whohad been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselvesplaying something else. Kites came in just about the time of thegreatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not havelasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, andkept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, andI suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth ofJuly. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, andhouse kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carriedover the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did notfly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it washeld in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the smallestboys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in the formof a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on theCommons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a kindof girl. The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the windbest, and flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was the house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly inthe form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at thebase than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of allthese kites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a stringcarried taut from stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to holdit; sometimes the sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing, and sometimes they were mortised into one another; but this was apt toweaken them. The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paperwas cut an inch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over thestring. Most of the boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; butmy boy and his brother could usually get paste from the printing-office;and when they could not they would make it by mixing flour and watercream-thick, and slowly boiling it. That was a paste that would holdtill the cows came home, the boys said, and my boy was courted for hisskill in making it. But after the kite was pasted, and dried in the sun, or behind the kitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (andyou nearly always were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands andtail-bands; that is, with strings carried from stick to stick over theface and at the bottom, to attach the cord for flying it and to fastenon the tail by. This took a good deal of art, and unless it were welldone the kite would not balance, but would be always pitching anddarting. Then the tail had to be of just the right weight; if it was tooheavy the kite kept sinking, even after you got it up where otherwise itwould stand; if too light, the kite would dart, and dash itself topieces on the ground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists ofpaper across a string a foot apart, till there were enough to balancethe kite; but this sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the besttail was made of a long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft ofdog-fennel at the end. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just theright weight was got; and when this was done, after several experimentaltests, the kite was laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, oron a long stretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tailstretched carefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. Youunwound a great length of twine, running backward, and letting the twineslip swiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then youseized the ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that allwas right, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from theground, and, swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into theair, with its long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swungfree. If there was not much surface wind you might have to run a littleway, but as soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straighteneditself, pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave itmore and more twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ranthrough your hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, atsuch a height that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight inthe distance. 

If it was a hot July day the sky would be full of kites, and the Commonswould be dotted over with boys holding them, or setting them up, orwinding them in, and all talking and screaming at the tops of theirvoices under the roasting sun. One might think that kite-flying, atleast, could be carried on quietly and peaceably; but it was not. Besides the wild debate of the rival excellences of the different kites, there were always quarrels from getting the strings crossed; for, as theboys got their kites up, they drew together for company and for aneasier comparison of their merits. It was only a mean boy who would tryto cross another fellow's string; but sometimes accidents would happen;two kites would become entangled, and both would have to be hauled in, while their owners cried and scolded, and the other fellows cheered andlaughed. Now and then the tail of a kite would part midway, and then thekite would begin to dart violently from side to side, and then to whirlround and round in swifter and narrower circles till it dashed itself tothe ground. Sometimes the kite-string would break, and the kite wouldwaver and fall like a bird shot in the wing; and the owner of the kite, and all the fellows who had no kites, would run to get it where it camedown, perhaps a mile or more away. It usually came down in a tree, andthey had to climb for it; but sometimes it lodged so high that no onecould reach it; and then it was slowly beaten and washed away in thewinds and rains, and its long tail left streaming all winter from thenaked bough where it had caught. It was so good for kites on theCommons, because there were no trees there, and not even fences, but avast open stretch of level grass, which the cows and geese kept croppedto the earth; and for the most part the boys had no trouble with theirkites there. Some of them had paper fringe pasted round the edges oftheir kites; this made a fine rattling as the kite rose, and when thekite stood, at the end of its string, you could hear the humming if youput your ear to the twine. But the most fun was sending up messengers. The messengers were cut out of thick paper, with a slit at one side, soas to slip over the string, which would be pulled level long enough togive the messenger a good start, and then released, when the wind wouldcatch the little circle, and drive it up the long curving incline tillit reached the kite. 

[Illustration: KITE TIME. ]

It was thought a great thing in a kite to pull, and it was a favor toanother boy to let him take hold of your string and feel how your kitepulled. If you wanted to play mumble-the-peg, or anything, while yourkite was up, you tied it to a stake in the ground, or gave it to someother fellow to hold; there were always lots of fellows eager to holdit. But you had to be careful how you let a little fellow hold it; for, if it was a very powerful kite, it would take him up. It was not certainjust how strong a kite had to be to take a small boy up, and nobody hadever seen a kite do it, but everybody expected to see it. 

IX. 

CIRCUSES AND SHOWS. 

WHAT every boy expected to do, some time or other, was to run off. Heexpected to do this because the scheme offered an unlimited field to theimagination, and because its fulfilment would give him the highestdistinction among the other fellows. To run off was held to be the onlyway for a boy to right himself against the wrongs and hardships of aboy's life. As far as the Boy's Town was concerned, no boy had anythingto complain of; the boys had the best time in the world there, and in amanner they knew it. But there were certain things that they felt no boyought to stand, and these things were sometimes put upon them at school, but usually at home. In fact, nearly all the things that a fellowintended to run off for were done to him by those who ought to have beenthe kindest to him. Some boys' mothers had the habit of making them stopand do something for them just when they were going away with thefellows. Others would not let them go in swimming as often as theywanted, and, if they saw them with their shirts on wrong side out, wouldnot believe that they could get turned in climbing a fence. Others madethem split kindling and carry in wood, and even saw wood. None of thesethings, in a simple form, was enough to make a boy run off, but theyprepared his mind for it, and when complicated with whipping they werejust cause for it. Weeding the garden, though, was a thing that almost, in itself, was enough to make a fellow run off. 

Not many of the boys really had to saw wood, though a good many of thefellows' fathers had saws and bucks in their wood-sheds. There werepublic sawyers who did most of the wood-sawing; and they came up withtheir bucks on their shoulders, and asked for the job almost as soon asthe wood was unloaded before your door. The most popular one with theboys was a poor half-wit known among them as Morn; and he was a favoritewith them because he had fits, and because, when he had a fit, he wouldseem to fly all over the woodpile. The boys would leave anything to seeMorn in a fit, and he always had a large crowd round him as soon as thecry went out that he was beginning to have one. They watched the haplesscreature with grave, unpitying, yet not unfriendly interest, tooignorant of the dark ills of life to know how deeply tragic was thespectacle that entertained them, and how awfully present in Morn'scontortions was the mystery of God's ways with his children, some ofwhom he gives to happiness and some to misery. When Morn began to pickhimself weakly up, with eyes of pathetic bewilderment, they helped himfind his cap, and tried to engage him in conversation, for the pleasureof seeing him twist his mouth when he said, of a famous town drunkardwhom he admired, "He's a strong man; he eats liquor. " It was probablypoor Morn's ambition to eat liquor himself, and the boys who followedthat drunkard about to plague him had a vague respect for his lamentableappetite. 

None of the boys ever did run off, except the son of one of thepreachers. He was a big boy, whom my boy remotely heard of, but neversaw, for he lived in another part of the town; but his adventure wasknown to all the boys, and his heroism rated high among them. It tooknothing from this, in their eyes, that he was found, homesick and cryingin Cincinnati, and was glad to come back--the great fact was that he hadrun off; nothing could change or annul that. If he had made any mistake, it was in not running off with a circus, for that was the true way ofrunning off. Then, if you were ever seen away from home, you were seentumbling through a hoop and alighting on the crupper of a barebackedpiebald, and if you ever came home you came home in a gilded chariot, and you flashed upon the domestic circle in flesh-colored tights andspangled breech-cloth. As soon as the circus-bills began to be put upyou began to hear that certain boys were going to run off with thatcircus, and the morning after it left town you heard they had gone, butthey always turned up at school just the same. It was believed that thecircus-men would take any boy who wanted to go with them, and wouldfight off his friends if they tried to get him away. 

The boys made a very careful study of the circus-bills, and afterwards, when the circus came, they held the performance to a strict account forany difference between the feats and their representation. For afortnight beforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of thecircus into a fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question witha great many whether they could get their fathers to give them the moneyto go in. The full price was two bits, and the half-price was a bit, ora Spanish _real_, then a commoner coin than the American dime in theWest; and every boy, for that time only, wished to be little enough tolook young enough to go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a freeticket for every member of their families; and my boy was sure of goingto the circus from the first rumor of its coming. But he was none theless deeply thrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on themorning of the great day, to go out and meet the circus processionbeyond the corporation line. 

I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory ofsuch a sight. Once there were two chariots--one held the band inred-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and theother was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vastmythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls inthe gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in thissplendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it inrapture through every turn and winding of its course in the Boy's Town;nor in the magnificence of the actors and actresses, who came riding twoby two in their circus-dresses after the chariots, and looking somehaughty and contemptuous, and others quiet and even bored, as if it werenothing to be part of such a procession. The boys tried to make them outby the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the bare-backrider, and which was O'Dale, the champion tumbler; which was theIndia-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown. Covered withdust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours' run beside theprocession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived with iton the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and thering was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headed tent-stakes, and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of the pavilion whichthey were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys were not allowed tocome anywhere near, except three or four who got leave to fetch waterfrom a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paid withhalf-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word with themas they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money to goin would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of comingclose to the circus-men. They stood about in twos and threes, and layupon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was betterthan a sawdust ring; there were different opinions. They came as nearthe wagons as they dared, and looked at the circus-horses munching hayfrom the tail-boards, just like common horses. The wagons were leftstanding outside of the tent; but when it was up, the horses were takeninto the dressing-room, and then the boys, with many a backward look atthe wide spread of canvas, and the flags and streamers floating over itfrom the centre-pole (the centre-pole was revered almost like adistinguished personage), ran home to dinner so as to get back good andearly, and be among the first to go in. All round, before the circusdoors were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting peopleto come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, andthere were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried, "Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way to get up!" The boys thought this brilliantdrolling, but they had no time to listen after the doors were open, andthey had no money to spend on side-shows or dainties, anyway. Inside thetent, they found it dark and cool, and their hearts thumped in theirthroats with the wild joy of being there; they recognized one anotherwith amaze, as if they had not met for years, and the excitement keptgrowing, as other fellows came in. It was lots of fun, too, watching thecountry-jakes, as the boys called the farmer-folk, and seeing how greenthey looked, and how some of them tried to act smart with the circus-menthat came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to seewhether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in. Theboys held it to be a high and creditable thing to hook into a show ofany kind, but hooking into a circus was something that a fellow ought tobe held in special honor for doing. He ran great risks, and if heescaped the vigilance of the massive circus-man who patrolled theoutside of the tent with a cowhide and a bulldog, perhaps he merited thefame he was sure to win. 

I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that governthem. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves offas he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, andother boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps theycome down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, andthe unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliestAryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospectof the Boy's Town. The standard of honor there was, in a certain way, very high among the boys; they would have despised a thief as hedeserved, and I cannot remember one of them who might not have beensafely trusted. None of them would have taken an apple out of amarket-wagon, or stolen a melon from a farmer who came to town with it;but they would all have thought it fun, if not right, to rob an orchardor hook a watermelon out of a patch. This would have been a foray intothe enemy's country, and the fruit of the adventure would have been thesame as the plunder of a city, or the capture of a vessel belonging tohim on the high seas. In the same way, if one of the boys had seen acircus-man drop a quarter, he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only have been proud to hook into the circus-man's show, and the other fellows would have been proud of his exploit, too, assomething that did honor to them all. As a person who enclosed boundsand forbade trespass, the circus-man constituted himself the enemy ofevery boy who respected himself, and challenged him to practise any sortof strategy. There was not a boy in the crowd that my boy went with whowould have been allowed to hook into a circus by his parents; yethooking in was an ideal that was cherished among them, that was talkedof, and that was even sometimes attempted, though not often. Once, whena fellow really hooked in, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid, one of the fellows could not stand it. He asked him just how and wherehe got in, and then he went to the door, and got back his money from thedoorkeeper upon the plea that he did not feel well; and in five or tenminutes he was back among the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur aswould be hard to describe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he reallywas--a little lying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so, though he had on some other point of personal honesty the most fantasticscruples. 

The boys liked to be at the circus early so as to make sure of thegrand entry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled roundon horseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. Thefellows were united in this, but upon other matters feeling varied--someliked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; some bare-back riding; somethe feats of tossing knives and balls and catching them. There never wasmore than one ring in those days; and you were not tempted to break yourneck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying to watch all the thingsthat went on at once in two or three rings. The boys did not miss thesmallest feats of any performance, and they enjoyed them every one, notequally, but fully. They had their preferences, of course, as I havehinted; and one of the most popular acts was that where a horse has beentrained to misbehave, so that nobody can mount him; and after the actorshave tried him, the ring-master turns to the audience, and asks if somegentleman among them wants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsycountry-jake is seen making his way down from one of the top-seatstowards the ring. He can hardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown hasto help him across the ring-board, and even then he trips and rolls overon the sawdust, and has to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him upto the horse, he falls against it; and the little fellows think he willcertainly get killed. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shutup and watch out. The ring-master and the clown manage to get thecountry-jake on to the broad platform on the horse's back, and then thering-master cracks his whip, and the two supes who have been holding thehorse's head let go, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. Thelittle fellows are just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, hereels and totters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out;and pretty soon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins tounbutton his long gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws itinto the ring, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a shortpipe into his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes astick that the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishmanjust come across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comesout a British soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comesoff, and he is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips dancing ahornpipe. Suddenly away flash wig and beard and false-face, thepantaloons are stripped off with the same movement, the actor stoops forthe reins lying on the horse's neck, and James Rivers, the greatestthree-horse rider in the world nimbly capers on the broad pad, andkisses his hand to the shouting and cheering spectators as he dashesfrom the ring past the braying and bellowing brass-band into thedressing-room!

The big boys have known all along that he was not a real country-jake;but when the trained mule begins, and shakes everybody off, just likethe horse, and another country-jake gets up, and offers to bet that hecan ride that mule, nobody can tell whether he is a real country-jake ornot. This is always the last thing in the performance, and the boys haveseen with heavy hearts many signs openly betokening the end which theyknew was at hand. The actors have come out of the dressing-room door, some in their everyday clothes, and some with just overcoats on overtheir circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the band-stand watchingthe performance in the ring. Some of the people are already getting upto go out, and stand for this last act, and will not mind the shouts of"Down in front! Down there!" which the boys eagerly join in, to eke outtheir bliss a little longer by keeping away even the appearance ofanything transitory in it. The country-jake comes stumbling awkwardlyinto the ring, but he is perfectly sober, and he boldly leaps astridethe mule, which tries all its arts to shake him off, plunging, kicking, rearing. He sticks on, and everybody cheers him, and the owner of themule begins to get mad and to make it do more things to shake thecountry-jake off. At last, with one convulsive spring, it flings himfrom its back, and dashes into the dressing-room, while the country-jakepicks himself up and vanishes among the crowd. 

A man mounted on a platform in the ring is imploring the ladies andgentlemen to keep their seats, and to buy tickets for the negro-minstrelentertainment which is to follow, but which is not included in the priceof admission. The boys would like to stay, but they have not the money, and they go out clamoring over the performance, and trying to decidewhich was the best feat. As to which was the best actor, there is neverany question; it is the clown, who showed by the way he turned a doublesomersault that he can do anything, and who chooses to be clown simplybecause he is too great a creature to enter into rivalry with the otheractors. 

There will be another performance in the evening, with real fightsoutside between the circus-men and the country-jakes, and perhaps someof the Basin rounders, but the boys do not expect to come; that would betoo much. The boy's brother once stayed away in the afternoon, and wentat night with one of the jour printers; but he was not able to reportthat the show was better than it was in the afternoon. He did not gethome till nearly ten o'clock, though, and he saw the sides of the tentdropped before the people got out; that was a great thing; and what wasgreater yet, and reflected a kind of splendor on the boy at second hand, was that the jour printer and the clown turned out to be old friends. After the circus, the boy actually saw them standing near thecentre-pole talking together; and the next day the jour showed thegrease that had dripped on his coat from the candles. Otherwise the boymight have thought it was a dream, that some one he knew had talked onequal terms with the clown. The boys were always intending to stay upand see the circus go out of town, and they would have done so, buttheir mothers would not let them. This may have been one reason why noneof them ever ran off with a circus. 

As soon as a circus had been in town, the boys began to have circuses oftheir own, and to practise for them. Everywhere you could see boysupside down, walking on their hands or standing on them with their legsdangling over, or stayed against house walls. It was easy to stand onyour head; one boy stood on his head so much that he had to have itshaved, in the brain fever that he got from standing on it; but that didnot stop the other fellows. Another boy fell head downwards from a railwhere he was skinning-the-cat, and nearly broke his neck, and made it sosore that it was stiff ever so long. Another boy, who was playingSamson, almost had his leg torn off by the fellows that were pulling atit with a hook; and he did have the leg of his pantaloons torn off. Nothing could stop the boys but time, or some other play coming in; andcircuses lasted a good while. Some of the boys learned to turnhand-springs; anybody could turn cart-wheels; one fellow, across theriver, could just run along and throw a somersault and light on hisfeet; lots of fellows could light on their backs; but if you had aspring-board, or shavings under a bank, like those by the turning-shop, you could practise for somersaults pretty safely. 

All the time you were practising you were forming your circus company. The great trouble was not that any boy minded paying five or ten pins tocome in, but that so many fellows wanted to belong there were hardly anyleft to form an audience. You could get girls, but even as spectatorsgirls were a little _too_ despicable; they did not know anything; theyhad no sense; if a follow got hurt they cried. Then another thing was, where to have the circus. Of course it was simply hopeless to think of atent, and a boy's circus was very glad to get a barn. The boy whosefather owned the barn had to get it for the circus without his fatherknowing it; and just as likely as not his mother would hear the noiseand come out and break the whole thing up while you were in the verymiddle of it. Then there were all sorts of anxieties and perplexitiesabout the dress. You could do something by turning your roundaboutinside out, and rolling your trousers up as far as they would go; butwhat a fellow wanted to make him a real circus actor was a long pair ofwhite cotton stockings, and I never knew a fellow that got a pair; Iheard of many a fellow who was said to have got a pair; but when youcame down to the fact, they vanished like ghosts when you try to verifythem. I believe the fellows always expected to get them out of abureau-drawer or the clothes-line at home, but failed. In most otherways, a boy's circus was always a failure, like most other things boysundertake. They usually broke up under the strain of rivalry; everybodywanted to be the clown or ring-master; or else the boy they got the barnof behaved badly, and went into the house crying, and all the fellowshad to run. 

There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy's Town:a Nigger Show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an AnimalShow, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menageriewhen they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show. Theonly perfect joy on earth in the way of an entertainment, of course, wasa circus, but after the circus the show came unquestionably next. Itmade a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as thecircus's, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation linein the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or fivecamels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession, the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, andthen the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips andcontemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, withpictures on their sides, very flattered portraits of the wild beasts andbirds inside; lions first, then tigers (never meaner than Royal Bengalones, which the boys understood to be a superior breed), then leopards, then pumas and panthers; then bears, then jackals and hyenas; then bearsand wolves; then kangaroos, musk-oxen, deer, and such harmless cattle;and then ostriches, emus, lyre-birds, birds-of-Paradise and all therest. From time to time the boys ran back from the elephants and camelsto get what good they could out of the scenes in which these hiddenwonders were dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they alwayscame forward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they hadto endure a degree of denial, for although you could see most of thecamels' figures, the elephants were so heavily draped that it was a kindof disappointment to look at them. The boys kept as close as they could, and came as near getting under the elephants' feet as the keepers wouldallow; but, after all, they were driven off a good deal and had to keepstealing back. They gave the elephants apples and bits of cracker andcake, and some tried to put tobacco into their trunks; though they knewvery well that it was nearly certain death to do so; for any elephantthat was deceived that way would recognize the boy that did it, and killhim the next time he came, if it was twenty years afterwards. The boysused to believe that the Miami bridge would break down under theelephants if they tried to cross it, and they would have liked to see itdo it, but no one ever saw it, perhaps because the elephants alwayswaded the river. Some boys had seen them wading it, and stopping todrink and squirt the water out of their trunks. If an elephant got a boythat had given him tobacco into the river, he would squirt water on himtill he drowned him. Still, some boys always tried to give the elephantstobacco, just to see how they would act for the time being. 

A show was not so much in favor as a circus, because there was so littleperformance in the ring. You could go round and look at the animals, mostly very sleepy in their cages, but you were not allowed to pokethem through the bars, or anything; and when you took your seat therewas nothing much till Herr Driesbach entered the lions' cage, and beganto make them jump over his whip. It was some pleasure to see him put hishead between the jaws of the great African King of Beasts, but the lionnever did anything to him, and so the act wanted a true dramatic climax. The boys would really rather have seen a bare-back rider, like JamesRivers, turn a back-somersault and light on his horse's crupper, anytime, though they respected Herr Driesbach, too; they did not care muchfor a woman who once went into the lions' cage and made them jump round. 

If you had the courage you could go up the ladder into the curtainedtower on the elephant's back, and ride round the ring with some of theother fellows; but my boy at least never had the courage; and he neverwas of those who mounted the trick pony and were shaken off as soon asthey got on. It seemed to be a good deal of fun, but he did not dare torisk it; and he had an obscure trouble of mind when, the last thing, four or five ponies were brought out with as many monkeys tied on theirbacks, and set to run a race round the ring. The monkeys always lookedvery miserable, and even the one who won the race, and rode roundafterwards with an American flag in his hand and his cap very muchcocked over his left eye, did not seem to cheer up any. 

The boys had their own beliefs about the different animals, and one ofthese concerned the inappeasable ferocity of the zebra. I do not knowwhy the zebra should have had this repute, for he certainly never didanything to deserve it; but, for the matter of that, he was like all theother animals. Bears were not much esteemed, but they would have been ifthey could have been really seen hugging anybody to death. It was alwayshoped that some of the fiercest animals would get away and have to behunted down, and retaken after they had killed a lot of dogs. If theelephants, some of them, had gone crazy, it would have been something, for then they would have roamed up and down the turnpike smashingbuggies and wagons, and had to be shot with the six-pound cannon thatwas used to celebrate the Fourth of July with. 

Another thing that was against the show was that the animals were fedafter it was out, and you could not see the tigers tearing their preywhen the great lumps of beef were thrown them. There was somehow not somuch chance of hooking into a show as a circus, because the seats didnot go all round, and you could be seen under the cages as soon as yougot in under the canvas. I never heard of a boy that hooked into a show;perhaps nobody ever tried. 

A show had the same kind of smell as a circus, up to a certain point, and then its smell began to be different. Both smelt of tan-bark orsaw-dust and trodden grass, and both smelt of lemonade and cigars; butafter that a show had its own smell of animals. I have found in laterlife that this is a very offensive smell on a hot day; but I do notbelieve a boy ever thinks so; for him it is just a different smell froma circus smell. There were two other reasons why a show was not as muchfun as a circus, and one was that it was thought instructive, andfellows went who were not allowed to go to circuses. But the greatreason of all was that you could not have an animal show of your own asyou could a circus. You could not get the animals; and no boy livingcould act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant so as to lookthe least like one. 

Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; butthey were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on yourshirt-sleeves. 

[Illustration: THE CIRCUS. ]

X. 

HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS. 

[Illustration: "THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS. "]

THE greatest day of all in the Boy's Town was Christmas. In that part ofthe West the boys had never even heard of Thanksgiving, and their eldersknew of it only as a festival of far-off New England. Christmas was theday that was kept in all churches and families, whether they wereMethodists or Episcopalians, Baptists or Universalists, Catholics orProtestants; and among boys of whatever persuasion it was kept in afashion that I suppose may have survived from the early pioneer times, when the means of expressing joy were few and primitive. On Christmaseve, before the church-bells began to ring in the day, the boys began tocelebrate it with guns and pistols, with shooting-crackers andtorpedoes; and they never stopped as long as their ammunition lasted. Afellow hardly ever had more than a bit to spend, and after he had paidten cents for a pack of crackers, he had only two cents and a half forpowder; and if he wanted his pleasure to last, he had to be careful. Ofcourse he wanted his pleasure to last, but he would rather have had nopleasure at all than be careful, and most of the boys woke Christmasmorning empty-handed, unless they had burst their pistols the nightbefore; then they had a little powder left, and could go pretty wellinto the forenoon if they could find some other boy who had shot off hispowder but had a whole pistol left. Lots of fellows' pistols got outof order without bursting, and that saved powder; but generally a fellowkept putting in bigger and bigger loads till his pistol blew to pieces. There were all sorts of pistols; but the commonest was one that the boyscalled a Christmas-crack; it was of brass, and when it burst the barrelcurled up like a dandelion stem when you split it and put it in water. AChristmas-crack in that shape was a trophy; but of course the littleboys did not have pistols; they had to put up with shooting-crackers, ormaybe just torpedoes. Even then the big boys would get to fire them offon one pretext or another. Some fellows would hold a cracker in theirhands till it exploded; nearly everybody had burned thumbs, and some ofthe boys had their faces blackened with powder. Now and then a fellowwho was nearly grown up would set off a whole pack of crackers in abarrel; it seemed almost incredible to the little boys. 

It was glorious, and I do not think any of the boys felt that there wasanything out of keeping in their way of celebrating the day, for I donot think they knew why they were celebrating it, or, if they knew, theynever thought. It was simply a holiday, and was to be treated like aholiday. After all, perhaps there are just as strange things done bygrown people in honor of the loving and lowly Saviour of Men; but wewill not enter upon that question. When they had burst their pistols orfired off their crackers, the boys sometimes huddled into the back partof the Catholic church and watched the service, awed by the dim altarlights, the rising smoke of incense, and the grimness of the sacristan, an old German, who stood near to keep order among them. They knew thefellows who were helping the priest; one of them was the boy who stoodon his head till he had to have it shaved; they would have liked to mockhim then and there for wearing a petticoat, and most of them had thebitterest scorn and hate for Catholics in their hearts; but they wereafraid of the sacristan, and they behaved very well as long as they werein the church; but as soon as they got out they whooped and yelled, andstoned the sacristan when he ran after them. 

My boy would have liked to do all that too, just to be with the crowd, but at home he had been taught to believe that Catholics were as good asanybody, and that you must respect everybody's religion. His father andthe priest were friendly acquaintances, and in a dim way he knew thathis father had sometimes taken the Catholics' part in his paper when theprejudice against foreigners ran high. He liked to go to the Catholicchurch, though he was afraid of the painted figure that hung full lengthon the wooden crucifix, with the blood-drops under the thorns on itsforehead, and the red wound in its side. He was afraid of it assomething both dead and alive; he could not keep his eyes away from theawful, beautiful, suffering face, and the body that seemed to twist inagony, and the hands and feet so cruelly nailed to the cross. 

But he never connected the thought of that anguish with Christmas. Hishead was too full of St. Nicholas, who came down the chimney, and filledyour stockings; the day belonged to St. Nicholas. The first thing whenyou woke you tried to catch everybody, and you caught a person if yousaid "Christmas Gift!" before he or she did; and then the person youcaught had to give you a present. Nobody ever said "Merry Christmas!"as people do now; and I do not know where the custom of saying"Christmas Gift" came from. It seems more sordid and greedy than itreally was; the pleasure was to see who could say it first; and the boysdid not care for what they got if they beat, any more than they caredfor what they won in fighting eggs at Easter. 

At New-Year's the great thing was to sit up and watch the old year out;but the little boys could not have kept awake even if their mothers hadlet them. In some families, perhaps of Dutch origin, the day was keptinstead of Christmas, but for most of the fellows it was a dull time. You had spent all your money at Christmas, and very likely burst yourpistol, anyway. It was some consolation to be out of school, which didnot keep on New-Year's; and if it was cold you could have fires on theice; or, anyway, you could have fires on the river-bank, or down by theshore, where there was always plenty of drift-wood. 

But New-Year's could not begin to compare with Easter. All the boys'mothers colored eggs for them at Easter; I do not believe there was amother in the Boy's Town mean enough not to. By Easter Day, in thatSouthern region, the new grass was well started, and grass gave abeautiful yellow color to the eggs boiled with it. Onions colored them asoft, pale green, and logwood, black; but the most esteemed egg of allwas a calico-egg. You got a piece of new calico from your mother, ormaybe some of your aunts, and you got somebody (most likely yourgrandmother, if she was on a visit at the time) to sew an egg up in it;and when the egg was boiled it came out all over the pattern of thecalico. My boy's brother once had a calico-egg that seemed to my boy amore beautiful piece of color than any Titian he has seen since; it waskept in a bureau-drawer till nobody could stand the smell. But mostEaster eggs never outlasted Easter Day. As soon as the fellows were donebreakfast they ran out of the house and began to fight eggs with theother fellows. They struck the little ends of the eggs together, and ifyour egg broke another fellow's egg, then you had a right to it. Sometimes an egg was so hard that it would break every other egg in thestreet; and generally when a little fellow lost his egg, he began to cryand went into the house. This did not prove him a cry-baby; it wasallowable, like crying when you stumped your toe. I think this custom offighting eggs came from the Pennsylvania Germans, to whom the Boy's Townprobably owed its Protestant observance of Easter. There was nothingreligious in the way the boys kept it, any more than there was in theirway of keeping Christmas. 

I do not think they distinguished between it and All-Fool's Day incharacter or dignity. About the best thing you could do then was towrite April Fool on a piece of paper and pin it to a fellow's back, ormaybe a girl's, if she was a big girl, and stuck-up, or anything. I donot suppose there is a boy now living who is silly enough to play thistrick on anybody, or mean enough to fill an old hat with rocks andbrickbats, and dare a fellow to kick it; but in the Boy's Town therewere some boys who did this; and then the fellow had to kick the hat, orelse come under the shame of having taken a dare. Most of theApril-foolings were harmless enough, like saying, "Oh, see that flock ofwild-geese flying over!" and "What have you got on the back of yourcoat!" and holloing "April Fool!" as soon as the person did it. Sometimes a crowd of boys got a bit with a hole in it, and tied a stringin it, and laid it on the sidewalk, and then hid in a cellar, and whenanybody stooped to pick it up, they pulled it in. That was the greatestfun, especially if the person was stingy; but the difficulty was to getthe bit, whether it had a hole in it or not. 

From the first of April till the first of May was a long stretch ofdays, and you never heard any one talk about a May Party till April Foolwas over. Then there always began to be talk of a May Party, and who wasgoing to be invited. It was the big girls that always intended to haveit, and it was understood at once who was going to be the Queen. Atleast the boys had no question, for there was one girl in every schoolwhom all the boys felt to be the most beautiful; but probably there wasa good deal of rivalry and heart-burning among the girls themselves. Very likely it was this that kept a May Party from hardly ever coming toanything but the talk. Besides the Queen, there were certain littlegirls who were to be Lambs; I think there were Maids of Honor, too; butI am not sure. The Lambs had to keep very close to the Queen's person, and to wait upon her; and there were boys who had to hold the tassels ofthe banners which the big boys carried. These boys had to wear whitepantaloons, and shoes and stockings, and very likely gloves, and tosuffer the jeers of the other fellows who were not in the procession. The May Party was a girl's affair altogether, though the boys wereexpected to help; and so there were distinctions made that the boysnever dreamed of in their rude republic, where one fellow was as good asanother, and the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master ifhe was bold and strong enough. The boys did not understand thosedistinctions, and nothing of them remained in their minds after themoment; but the girls understood them, and probably they were taught athome to feel the difference between themselves and other girls, and tobelieve themselves of finer clay. At any rate, the May Party was apt tobe poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it mighthave been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that myboy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, andthat it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why, and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and thewomen seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held thebanner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, though hewas so young that he had afterwards only the vaguest remembrance ofmarching in the procession, and going to a raw and chilly grovesomewhere, and having untimely lemonade and cake. Yet these might havebeen the associations of some wholly different occasion. 

No aristocratic reserves marred the glory of Fourth of July. My boy wasquite a well-grown boy before he noticed that there were ever any cloudsin the sky except when it was going to rain. At all other times, especially in summer, it seemed to him that the sky was perfectly blue, from horizon to horizon; and it certainly was so on the Fourth of July. He usually got up pretty early, and began firing off torpedoes andshooting-crackers, just as at Christmas. Everybody in town had beenwakened by the salutes fired from the six-pounder on the river-bank, andby the noise of guns and pistols; and right after breakfast you heardthat the Butler Guards were out, and you ran up to the court-house yardwith the other fellows to see if it was true. It was not true, just yet, perhaps, but it came true during the forenoon, and in the meantime thecourt-house yard was a scene of festive preparation. There was going tobe an oration and a public dinner, and they were already setting thetables under the locust-trees. There may have been some charge for thisdinner, but the boys never knew of that, or had any question of thebounty that seemed free as the air of the summer day. 

High Street was thronged with people, mostly country-jakes who had cometo town with their wagons and buggies for the celebration. The youngfellows and their girls were walking along hand in hand, eatinggingerbread, and here and there a farmer had already begun his spree, and was whooping up and down the sidewalk unmolested by authority. Theboys did not think it at all out of the way for him to be in that state;they took it as they took the preparations for the public dinner, and nosense of the shame and sorrow it meant penetrated their tough ignoranceof life. He interested them because, after the regular town drunkards, he was a novelty; but, otherwise, he did not move them. By and by theywould see him taken charge of by his friends and more or less broughtunder control; though if you had the time to follow him up you could seehim wanting to fight his friends and trying to get away from them. Whiskey was freely made and sold and drunk in that time and that region;but it must not be imagined that there was no struggle againstintemperance. The boys did not know it, but there was a very strenuousfight in the community against the drunkenness that was so frequent; andthere were perhaps more people who were wholly abstinent then than thereare now. The forces of good and evil were more openly arrayed againsteach other among people whose passions were strong and still somewhatprimitive; and those who touched not, tasted not, handled not, faroutnumbered those who looked upon the wine when it was red. The pity forthe boys was that they saw the drunkards every day, and the temperancemen only now and then; and out of the group of boys who were my boy'sfriends, many kindly fellows came to know how strong drink could rage, how it could bite like the serpent, and sting like an adder. 

But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as thedrunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with theMasons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth, and then there was nothing but a temperance picnic in the SycamoreGrove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars. It was notgay; there was no good reason why it should leave the boys with thefeeling of having been cheated out of their holiday, but it did. A boy'sFourth of July seemed to end about four o'clock, anyhow. After that, hebegan to feel gloomy, no matter what sort of a time he had. That was theway he felt after almost any holiday. 

Market-day was a highday in the Boy's Town, and it would be hard to saywhether it was more so in summer than in winter. In summer, the marketopened about four or five o'clock in the morning, and by this hour myboy's father was off twice a week with his market-basket on his arm. All the people did their marketing in the same way; but it was asurprise for my boy, when he became old enough to go once with hisfather, to find the other boys' fathers at market too. He held on by hisfather's hand, and ran by his side past the lines of wagons thatstretched sometimes from the bridge to the court-house, in the dimmorning light. The market-house, where the German butchers in theirwhite aprons were standing behind their meat-blocks, was lit up withcandles in sconces, that shone upon festoons of sausage and cuts ofsteak dangling from the hooks behind them; but without, all was in avague obscurity, broken only by the lanterns in the farmers' wagons. There was a market-master, who rang a bell to open the market, and ifanybody bought or sold anything before the tap of that bell, he would befined. People would walk along the line of wagons, where the butter andeggs, apples and peaches and melons, were piled up inside near thetail-boards, and stop where they saw something they wanted, and standnear so as to lay hands on it the moment the bell rang. My boyremembered stopping that morning by the wagon of some nice old Quakerladies, who used to come to his house, and whom his father stoodchatting with till the bell rang. They probably had an understandingwith him about the rolls of fragrant butter which he instantly liftedinto his basket. But if you came long after the bell rang, you had totake what you could get. 

There was a smell of cantaloupes in the air, along the line of wagons, that morning, and so it must have been towards the end of the summer. After the nights began to lengthen and to be too cold for the farmers tosleep in their wagons, as they did in summer on the market eves, themarket time was changed to midday. Then it was fun to count the wagonson both sides of the street clear to where they frayed off intowood-wagons, and to see the great heaps of apples and cabbages, andpotatoes and turnips, and all the other fruits and vegetables whichabounded in that fertile country. There was a great variety of poultryfor sale, and from time to time the air would be startled with theclamor of fowls transferred from the coops where they had been softlycrr-crring in soliloquy to the hand of a purchaser who walked off withthem and patiently waited for their well-grounded alarm to die away. Allthe time the market-master was making his rounds; and if he saw a poundroll of butter that he thought was under weight, he would weigh it withhis steelyards, and if it was too light he would seize it. My boy oncesaw a confiscation of this sort with such terror as he would now, perhaps, witness an execution. 

XI. 

MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS. 

THE Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I donot believe there was a fellow in the Boy's Town who ever even tried toimagine a more splendid body of troops: when they talked of them, asthey did a great deal, it was simply to revel in the recognition oftheir perfection. I forget just what their uniform was, but there werewhite pantaloons in it, and a tuft of white-and-red cockerel plumes thatalmost covered the front of the hat, and swayed when the soldier walked, and blew in the wind. I think the coat was gray, and the skirts werebuttoned back with buff, but I will not be sure of this; and somehow Icannot say how the officers differed from the privates in dress; it wasimpossible for them to be more magnificent. They walked backwards infront of the platoons, with their swords drawn, and held in theirwhite-gloved hands at hilt and point, and kept holloing, "Shoulder-r-r--arms! Carry--arms! Present--arms!" and then faced round, and walked a few steps forward, till they could think of something elseto make the soldiers do. 

[Illustration: THE "BUTLER GUARDS. "]

Every boy intended to belong to the Butler Guards when he grew up; andhe would have given anything to be the drummer or the marker. These wereboth boys, and they were just as much dressed up as the Guardsthemselves, only they had caps instead of hats with plumes. It wasstrange that the other fellows somehow did not know who these boys were;but they never knew, or at least my boy never knew. They thought more ofthe marker than of the drummer; for the marker carried a little flag, and when the officers holloed out, "By the left flank--left! Wheel!" heset his flag against his shoulder, and stood marking time with his feettill the soldiers all got by him, and then he ran up to the front rank, with the flag fluttering behind him. The fellows used to wonder how hegot to be marker, and to plan how they could get to be markers in othercompanies, if not in the Butler Guards. There were other companies thatused to come to town on the Fourth of July and Muster Day, from smallerplaces round about; and some of them had richer uniforms: one companyhad blue coats with gold epaulets, and gold braid going down in loops onthe sides of their legs; all the soldiers, of course, had braid straightdown the outer seams of their pantaloons. One Muster Day, a captain ofone of the country companies came home with my boy's father to dinner;he was in full uniform, and he put his plumed helmet down on the entrytable just like any other hat. 

There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always calledthem; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe, and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys saidfor stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutchofficers had to call out to the men when they were marching, "Up mit dehay-foot, down mit de straw-foot--_links_, _links_, _links_!" (Left, left, left!) But the boys honored even these imperfect intelligences somuch in their quality of soldiers that they would any of them havebeen proud to be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed theDutchmen round in their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Ofcourse, school let out when there was a regular muster, and the boysgave the whole day to it; but I do not know just when the Muster Daycame. They fired the cannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they musthave camped somewhere near the town, though no recollection of tentsremained in my boy's mind. He believed with the rest of the boys thatthe right way to fire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touchit off, but just keep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it awaywhen you wanted the cannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram thepiece full of dog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then heexpected the cannon to burst. But it only roared away as usual. 

The boys had their own ideas of what that cannon could do if aptly firedinto a force of British, or Bridish, as they called them. They wishedthere could be a war with England, just to see; and their nationalfeeling was kept hot by the presence of veterans of the War of 1812 atall the celebrations. One of the boys had a grandfather who had been inthe Revolutionary War, and when he died the Butler Guards fired a saluteover his grave. It was secret sorrow and sometimes open shame to my boythat his grandfather should be an Englishman, and that even his fathershould have been a year old when he came to this country; but on hismother's side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather whohad taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars againstGreat Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhapsmore, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed astruly as any of them to march against the hereditary, orhalf-hereditary, enemy. 

Playing war was one of the regular plays, and the sides were alwaysAmericans and Bridish, and the Bridish always got whipped. But this wasa different thing, and a far less serious thing, than having a company. The boys began to have companies after every muster, of course; butsometimes they began to have them for no external reason. Very likelythey would start having a company from just finding a rooster'stail-feather, and begin making plumes at once. It was easy to make aplume: you picked up a lot of feathers that the hens and geese haddropped; and you whittled a pine stick, and bound the feathers inspirals around it with white thread. That was a first-rate plume, butthe uniform offered the same difficulties as the circus dress, and youcould not do anything towards it by rolling up your pantaloons. It waspretty easy to make swords out of laths, but guns again were hard torealize. Some fellows had little toy guns left over from Christmas, butthey were considered rather babyish, and any kind of stick was better;the right kind of a gun for a boy's company was a wooden gun, such assome of the big boys had, with the barrel painted different from thestock. The little fellows never had any such guns, and if the questionof uniform could have been got over, this question of arms would stillhave remained. In these troubles the fellows' mothers had to sufferalmost as much as the fellows themselves, the fellows teased them somuch for bits of finery that they thought they could turn to account ineking out a uniform. Once it came to quite a lot of fellows gettingtheir mothers to ask their fathers if they would buy them some littlesoldier-hats that one of the hatters had laid in, perhaps after amuster, when he knew the boys would begin recruiting. My boy was by whenhis mother asked his father, and stood with his heart in his mouth, while the question was argued; it was decided against him, both becausehis father hated the tomfoolery of the thing, and because he would nothave the child honor any semblance of soldiering, even such a feebleimage of it as a boys' company could present. But, after all, a paperchapeau, with a panache of slitted paper, was no bad soldier-hat; itwent far to constitute a whole uniform; and it was this that the boysdevolved upon at last. It was the only company they ever really gottogether, for everybody wanted to be captain and lieutenant, just asthey wanted to be clown and ring-master in a circus. I cannot understandhow my boy came to hold either office; perhaps the fellows found thatthe only way to keep the company together was to take turn-about; but, at any rate, he was marshalling his forces near his grandfather's gateone evening when his grandfather came home to tea. The old Methodistclass-leader, who had been born and brought up a Quaker, stared at thepoor little apparition in horror. Then he caught the paper chapeau fromthe boy's head, and, saying "Dear me! Dear me!" trampled it under foot. It was an awful moment, and in his hot and bitter heart the boy, who wasput to shame before all his fellows, did not know whether to order themto attack his grandfather in a body, or to engage him in single combatwith his own lath-sword. In the end he did neither; his grandfatherwalked on into tea, and the boy was left with a wound that was sore tillhe grew old enough to know how true and brave a man his grandfather wasin a cause where so many warlike hearts wanted courage. 

It was already the time of the Mexican war, when that part of the Westat least was crazed with a dream of the conquest which was to carryslavery wherever the flag of freedom went. The volunteers were musteredin at the Boy's Town; and the boys, who understood that they were realsoldiers, and were going to a war where they might get killed, suffereda disappointment from the plain blue of their uniform and the simplicityof their caps, which had not the sign of a feather in them. It was aconsolation to know that they were going to fight the Mexicans; not somuch consolation as if it had been the Bridish, though still something. The boys were proud of them, and they did not realize that most of thesepoor fellows were just country-jakes. Somehow they effaced even theButler Guards in their fancy, though the Guards paraded with them, inall their splendor, as escort. 

But this civic satisfaction was alloyed for my boy by the consciousnessthat both his father and his grandfather abhorred the war that thevolunteers were going to. His grandfather, as an Abolitionist, and hisfather, as a Henry Clay Whig, had both been opposed to the annexation ofTexas (which the boy heard talked of without knowing in the least whatannexation meant), and they were both of the mind that the war growingout of it was wanton and wicked. His father wrote against it in everynumber of his paper, and made himself hated among its friends, who werethe large majority in the Boy's Town. My boy could not help feeling thathis father was little better than a Mexican, and whilst his filial lovewas hurt by things that he heard to his disadvantage, he was not surethat he was not rightly hated. It gave him a trouble of mind that wasnot wholly appeased by some pieces of poetry that he used to hear hisfather reading and quoting at that time, with huge enjoyment. The pieceswere called "The Biglow Papers, " and his father read them out of aBoston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things thatever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines--

 "Ez fur war, I call it murder-- There ye hev it plain and flat; 'N I don't want to go no furder Then my Testament fur that. God hez said so plump and fairly: It's as long as it is broad; And ye'll hev to git up airly, Ef ye want to take in God. "

He thought this fine, too, but still, it seemed to him, in the narrowlittle world where a child dwells, that his father and his grandfatherwere about the only people there were who did not wish the Mexicanswhipped, and he felt secretly guilty for them before the other boys. 

It was all the harder to bear because, up to this time, there had beenno shadow of difference about politics between him and the boys he wentwith. They were Whig boys, and nearly all the fellows in the Boy's Townseemed to be Whigs. There must have been some Locofoco boys, of course, for my boy and his friends used to advance, on their side, the positionthat

 "Democrats Eat dead rats!"

The counter-argument that

 "Whigs Eat dead pigs!"

had no force in a pork-raising country like that; but it was urged, andthere must have been Democratic boys to urge it. Still, they must havebeen few in number, or else my boy did not know them. At any rate, theyhad no club, and the Whig boys always had a club. They had a Henry ClayClub in 1844, and they had Buckeye Clubs whenever there was an electionfor governor, and they had clubs at every exciting town or county ordistrict election. The business of a Whig club among the boys was toraise ash flag-poles, in honor of Henry Clay's home at Ashland, and tolearn the Whig songs and go about singing them. You had to have a wagon, too, and some of the club pulled while the others rode; it could be sucha wagon as you went walnutting with; and you had to wear strands ofbuckeyes round your neck. Then you were a real Whig boy, and you had aright to throw fire-balls and roll tar-barrels for the bonfires onelection nights. 

I do not know why there should have been so many empty tar-barrels inthe Boy's Town, or what they used so much tar for; but there werebarrels enough to celebrate all the Whig victories that the boys everheard of, and more, too; the boys did not always wait for the victories, but celebrated every election with bonfires, in the faith that it wouldturn out right. 

Maybe the boys nowadays do not throw fire-balls, or know about them. They were made of cotton rags wound tight and sewed, and then soaked inturpentine. When a ball was lighted a boy caught it quickly up, andthrew it, and it made a splendid streaming blaze through the air, and athrilling whir as it flew. A boy had to be very nimble not to getburned, and a great many boys dropped the ball for every boy that threwit. I am not ready to say why these fire-balls did not set the Boy'sTown on fire, and burn it down, but I know they never did. There was nolaw against them, and the boys were never disturbed in throwing them, any more than they were in building bonfires; and this shows, as much asanything, what a glorious town that was for boys. The way they used tobuild their bonfires was to set one tar-barrel on top of another, ashigh as the biggest boy could reach, and then drop a match into them; ina moment a dusky, smoky flame would burst from the top, and fly therelike a crimson flag, while all the boys leaped and danced round it, andhurrahed for the Whig candidates. Sometimes they would tumble theblazing barrels over, and roll them up and down the street. 

The reason why they wore buckeyes was that the buckeye was the emblem ofOhio, and Ohio, they knew, was a Whig state. I doubt if they knew thatthe local elections always went heavily against the Whigs; but perhapsthey would not have cared. What they felt was a high public spirit, which had to express itself in some way. One night, out of pure zeal forthe common good, they wished to mob the negro quarter of the town, because the "Dumb Negro" (a deaf-mute of color who was a very prominentpersonage in their eyes) was said to have hit a white boy. I believe themob never came to anything. I only know that my boy ran a long way withthe other fellows, and, when he gave out, had to come home alone throughthe dark, and was so afraid of ghosts that he would have been glad ofthe company of the lowest-down black boy in town. 

There were always fights on election-day between well-known Whig andDemocratic champions, which the boys somehow felt were as entirely fortheir entertainment as the circuses. My boy never had the heart to lookon, but he shared the excitement of the affair, and rejoiced in thetriumph of Whig principles in these contests as cordially as thehardiest witness. The fighting must have come from the drinking, whichbegan as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day and nightwith a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen. In fact, thepolitics of the Boy's Town seem to have been transacted with an eyesingle to the diversion of the boys; or if not that quite, they weremarked by traits of a primitive civilization among the men. Thetraditions of a rude hospitality in the pioneer times still lingered, and once there was a Whig barbecue, which had all the profusion of acivic feast in mediæval Italy. Every Whig family contributed loaves ofbread and boiled hams; the Whig farmers brought in barrels of cider andwagon-loads of apples; there were heaps of pies and cakes; sheep wereroasted whole, and young roast pigs, with oranges in their mouths, stoodin the act of chasing one another over the long tables which were spreadin one of the largest pork-houses, where every comer was freely welcome. I suppose boys, though, were not allowed at the dinner; all that my boysaw of the barbecue were the heaps of loaves and hams left over, thatpiled the floor in one of the rooms to the ceiling. 

He remained an ardent Whig till his eleventh year, when his father leftthe party because the Whigs had nominated, as their candidate forpresident, General Taylor, who had won his distinction in the Mexicanwar, and was believed to be a friend of slavery, though afterwards heturned out otherwise. My boy then joined a Free-Soil club, and sangsongs in support of Van Buren and Adams. His faith in the purity of theWhigs had been much shaken by their behavior in trying to make capitalout of a war they condemned; and he had been bitterly disappointed bytheir preferring Taylor to Tom Corwin, the favorite of the anti-slaveryWhigs. The "Biglow Papers" and their humor might not have moved him fromhis life-long allegiance, but the eloquence of Corwin's famous speechagainst the Mexican war had grounded him in principles which he couldnot afterwards forsake. He had spoken passages of that speech at school;he had warned our invading hosts of the vengeance that has waited uponthe lust of conquest in all times, and has driven the conquerors backwith trailing battle-flags. "So shall it be with yours!" he haddeclaimed. "You may carry them to the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras;they may float in insolent triumph in the halls of Montezuma; but theweakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer, can call down a poweragainst you before which the iron hearts of your warriors shall beturned into ashes!" It must have been a terrible wrench for him to partfrom the Whig boys in politics, and the wrench must have been a suddenone at last; he was ashamed of his father for opposing the war, andthen, all at once, he was proud of him for it, and was roaring out songsagainst Taylor as the hero of that war, and praising Little Van, whom hehad hitherto despised as the "Fox of Kinderhook. "

The fox was the emblem (_totem_) of the Democrats in the campaigns of1840 and 1844; and in their processions they always had a fox chained tothe hickory flag-poles which they carried round on their wagons, together with a cock, reconciled probably in a common terror. The Whigsalways had the best processions; and one of the most signal days of myboy's life was the day he spent in following round a Henry Clayprocession, where the different trades and industries were representedin the wagons. There were coopers, hatters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, bakers, tinners, and others, all hard at work; and from time to timethey threw out to the crowd something they had made. My boy caught a tincup, and if it had been of solid silver he could not have felt it agreater prize. He ran home to show it and leave it in safe-keeping, andthen hurried back, so as to walk with the other boys abreast of a greatplatform on wheels, where an old woman sat spinning inside of alog-cabin, and a pioneer in a hunting-shirt stood at the door, with hislong rifle in his hand. In the window sat a raccoon, which was the Whigemblem, and which, on all their banners, was painted with the legend, "That same old Coon!" to show that they had not changed at all since thegreat days when they elected the pioneer, General Harrison, president ofthe United States. Another proof of the fact was the barrel ofhard-cider which lay under the cabin window. 

XII. 

PETS. 

AS there are no longer any Whig boys in the world, the coon can nolonger be kept anywhere as a political emblem, I dare say. Even in myboy's time the boys kept coons just for the pleasure of it, and withoutmeaning to elect Whig governors and presidents with them. I do not knowhow they got them--they traded for them, perhaps, with fellows in thecountry that had caught them, or perhaps their fathers bought them inmarket; some people thought they were very good to eat, and, likepoultry and other things for the table, they may have been brought aliveto market. But, anyhow, when a boy had a coon, he had to have astore-box turned open side down to keep it in, behind the house; and hehad to have a little door in the box to pull the coon out through whenhe wanted to show it to other boys, or to look at it himself, which hedid forty or fifty times a day, when he first got it. He had to have asmall collar for the coon, and a little chain, because the coon wouldgnaw through a string in a minute. The coon himself never seemed to takemuch interest in keeping a coon, or to see much fun or sense in it. Heliked to stay inside his box, where he had a bed of hay, and wheneverthe boy pulled him out, he did his best to bite the boy. He had notricks; his temper was bad; and there was nothing about him except therings round his tail and his political principles that anybody couldcare for. He never did anything but bite, and try to get away, or elserun back into his box, which smelt, pretty soon, like an animal-show; hewould not even let a fellow see him eat. 

My boy's brother had a coon, which he kept a good while, at a time whenthere was no election, for the mere satisfaction of keeping a coon. During his captivity the coon bit his keeper repeatedly through thethumb, and upon the whole seemed to prefer him to any other food; I donot really know what coons eat in a wild state, but this captive coontasted the blood of nearly that whole family of children. Besides bitingand getting away, he never did the slightest thing worth remembering; asthere was no election, he did not even take part in a Whig procession. He got away two or three times. The first thing his owner would knowwhen he pulled the chain out was that there was no coon at the end ofit, and then he would have to poke round the inside of the box prettycarefully with a stick, so as not to get bitten; after that he wouldhave to see which tree the coon had gone up. It was usually the talllocust-tree in front of the house, and in about half a second all theboys in town would be there, telling the owner of the coon how to gethim. Of course the only way was to climb for the coon, which would beout at the point of a high and slender limb, and would bite you awfully, even if the limb did not break under you, while the boys kept whoopingand yelling and holloing out what to do, and Tip the dog just howledwith excitement. I do not know how that coon was ever caught, but I knowthat the last time he got away he was not found during the day, butafter nightfall he was discovered by moonlight in the locust-tree. Hisowner climbed for him, but the coon kept shifting about, and gettinghigher and higher, and at last he had to be left till morning. In themorning he was not there, nor anywhere. 

It had been expected, perhaps, that Tip would watch him, and grab him ifhe came down, and Tip would have done it probably if he had kept awake. He was a dog of the greatest courage, and he was especially fond ofhunting. He had been bitten oftener by that coon than anybody but thecoon's owner, but he did not care for biting. He was always gettingbitten by rats, but he was the greatest dog for rats that there almostever was. The boys hunted rats with him at night, when they came out ofthe stables that backed down to the Hydraulic, for water; and a dog wholiked above all things to lie asleep on the back-step, by day, and wouldno more think of chasing a pig out of the garden than he would think ofsitting up all night with a coon, would get frantic about rats, andwould perfectly wear himself out hunting them on land and in the water, and keep on after the boys themselves were tired. He was so fond ofhunting, anyway, that the sight of a gun would drive him about crazy; hewould lick the barrel all over, and wag his tail so hard that it wouldlift his hind-legs off the ground. 

I do not know how he came into that family, but I believe he was givento it full grown by somebody. It was some time after my boy failed tobuy what he called a Confoundland dog, from a colored boy who had it forsale, a pretty puppy with white and black spots which he had quite sethis heart on; but Tip more than consoled him. Tip was of no particularbreed, and he had no personal beauty; he was of the color of a mouse ofan elephant, and his tail was without the smallest grace; it was smoothand round, but it was so strong that he could pull a boy all over thetown by it, and usually did; and he had the best, and kindest, andtruest ugly old face in the world. He loved the whole human race, and asa watch-dog he was a failure through his trustful nature; he would nomore have bitten a person than he would have bitten a pig; but whereother dogs were concerned, he was a lion. He might be lying fast asleepin the back-yard, and he usually was, but if a dog passed the front ofthe house under a wagon, he would be up and after that dog before youknew what you were about. He seemed to want to fight country dogs theworst, but any strange dog would do. A good half the time he would comeoff best; but, however he came off, he returned to the back-yard withhis tongue hanging out, and wagging his tail in good-humor with all theworld. Nothing could stop him, however, where strange dogs wereconcerned. He was a Whig dog, of course, as any one could tell by hisname, which was Tippecanoe in full, and was given him because it was thenickname of General Harrison, the great Whig who won the battle ofTippecanoe. The boys' Henry Clay Club used him to pull the little wagonthat they went about in singing Whig songs, and he would pull five orsix boys, guided simply by a stick which he held in his mouth, and whicha boy held on either side of him. But if he caught sight of a dog thathe did not know, he would drop that stick and start for that dog as faroff as he could see him, spilling the Henry Clay Club out of the wagonpiecemeal as he went, and never stopping till he mixed up the strangedog in a fight where it would have been hard to tell which was eitherchampion and which was the club wagon. When the fight was over Tip wouldcome smilingly back to the fragments of the Henry Clay Club, with piecesof the vehicle sticking about him, and profess himself, in a dog's way, ready to go on with the concert. 

Any crowd of boys could get Tip to go off with them, in swimming, orhunting, or simply running races. He was known through the whole town, and beloved for his many endearing qualities of heart. As to his mind, it was perhaps not much to brag of, and he certainly had some defects ofcharacter. He was incurably lazy, and his laziness grew upon him as hegrew older, till hardly anything but the sight of a gun or a bone wouldmove him. He lost his interest in politics, and, though there is noreason to suppose that he ever became indifferent to his principles, itis certain that he no longer showed his early ardor. He joined theFree-Soil movement in 1848, and supported Van Buren and Adams, butwithout the zeal he had shown for Henry Clay. Once a year as long as thefamily lived in the Boy's Town, the children were anxious about Tip whenthe dog-law was put in force, and the constables went round shooting allthe dogs that were found running at large without muzzles. At this time, when Tip was in danger of going mad and biting people, he showed a mostunseasonable activity, and could hardly be kept in bounds. A dog whosesole delight at other moments was to bask in the summer sun, or dream bythe winter fire, would now rouse himself to an interest in everythingthat was going on in the dangerous world, and make forays into it at allunguarded points. The only thing to do was to muzzle him, and this wasdone by my boy's brother with a piece of heavy twine, in such a manneras to interfere with Tip's happiness as little as possible. It was amuzzle that need not be removed for either eating, drinking, orfighting; but it satisfied the law, and Tip always came safely throughthe dog-days, perhaps by favor or affection with the officers who wereso inexorable with some dogs. 

My boy long remembered with horror and remorse his part in giving up tojustice an unconscious offender, and seeing him pay for histransgression with his life. The boy was playing before his door, when aconstable came by with his rifle on his shoulder, and asked him if hehad seen any unmuzzled dogs about; and partly from pride at beingaddressed by a constable, partly from a nervous fear of refusing toanswer, and partly from a childish curiosity to see what would happen, he said, "Yes; one over there by the pork-house. " The constablewhistled, and the poor little animal, which had got lost from the farmerit had followed to town, came running into sight round the corner of thepork-house, and sat up on its haunches to look about. It was a small reddog, the size of a fox, and the boy always saw it afterwards as it satthere in the gray afternoon, and fascinated him with its deadly peril. The constable swung his rifle quickly to his shoulder; the sharp, whiplike report came, and the dog dropped over, and its heart's bloodflowed upon the ground and lay there in a pool. The boy ran into thehouse, with that picture forever printed in his memory. For him it wasas if he had seen a fellow-being slain, and had helped to bring him tohis death. 

Whilst Tip was still in his prime the family of children was furtherenriched by the possession of a goat; but this did not belong to thewhole family, or it was, at least nominally, the property of that eldestbrother they all looked up to. I do not know how they came by the goat, any more than I know how they came by Tip; I only know that there came atime when it was already in the family, and that before it was got ridof it was a presence there was no mistaking. Nobody who has not kept agoat can have any notion of how many different kinds of mischief a goatcan get into, without seeming to try, either, but merely by followingthe impulses of its own goatishness. This one was a nanny-goat, and itanswered to the name of Nanny with an intelligence that was otherwisewholly employed in making trouble. It went up and down stairs, fromcellar to garret, and in and out of all the rooms, like anybody, with afaint, cynical indifference in the glance of its cold gray eyes thatgave no hint of its purposes or performances. In the chambers it chewedthe sheets and pillow-cases on the beds, and in the dining-room, if itfound nothing else, it would do its best to eat the table-cloth. Washing-day was a perfect feast for it, for then it would banquet on theshirt-sleeves and stockings that dangled from the clothes-line, andsimply glut itself with the family linen and cotton. In default of thesedainties, Nanny would gladly eat a chip-hat; she was not proud; shewould eat a split-basket, if there was nothing else at hand. Once shegot up on the kitchen-table, and had a perfect orgy with a lot offresh-baked pumpkin-pies she found there; she cleaned all the pumpkin soneatly out of the pastry shells that, if there had been any more pumpkinleft, they could have been filled up again, and nobody could have toldthe difference. The grandmother, who was visiting in the house at thetime, declared to the mother that it would serve the father and the boysjust right if she did fill these very shells up and give them to thefather and the boys to eat. But I believe this was not done, and it wasonly suggested in a moment of awful exasperation, and because it was thefather who was to blame for letting the boys keep the goat. The motherwas always saying that the goat should not stay in the house anotherday, but she had not the heart to insist on its banishment, the childrenwere so fond of it. I do not know why they were fond of it, for it nevershowed them the least affection, but was always taking the most unfairadvantages of them, and it would butt them over whenever it got thechance. It would try to butt them into the well when they leaned down topull up the bucket from the curb; and if it came out of the house, andsaw a boy cracking nuts at the low flat stone the children had in theback-yard to crack nuts on, it would pretend that the boy was makingmotions to insult it, and before he knew what he was about it would flyat him and send him spinning head over heels. It was not of the leastuse in the world, and could not be, but the children were allowed tokeep it till, one fatal day, when the mother had a number of otherladies to tea, as the fashion used to be in small towns, when they satdown to a comfortable gossip over dainty dishes of stewed chicken, hotbiscuit, peach-preserves, sweet tomato-pickles, and pound-cake. That daythey all laid off their bonnets on the hall-table, and the goat, afterdemurely waiting and watching with its faded eyes, which saw everythingand seemed to see nothing, discerned a golden opportunity, and began tomake such a supper of bonnet-ribbons as perhaps never fell to a goat'slot in life before. It was detected in its stolen joys just as it hadchewed the ribbon of a best bonnet up to the bonnet, and was chased intothe back-yard; but, as it had swallowed the ribbon without being able toswallow the bonnet, it carried that with it. The boy who specially ownedthe goat ran it down in a frenzy of horror and apprehension, and managedto unravel the ribbon from its throat, and get back the bonnet. Then hetook the bonnet in and laid it carefully down on the table again, anddecided that it would be best not to say anything about the affair. Butsuch a thing as that could not be kept. The goat was known at once tohave done the mischief; and this time it was really sent away. All thechildren mourned it, and the boy who owned it the most used to go to thehouse of the people who took it, and who had a high board fence roundtheir yard, and try to catch sight of it through the cracks. When hecalled "Nanny" it answered him instantly with a plaintive "Baa!" andthen, after a vain interchange of lamentations, he had to come away, andconsole himself as he could with the pets that were left him. 

Among these were a family of white rabbits, which the boys kept in alittle hutch at the bottom of the yard. They were of no more use thanthe goat was, but they were at least not mischievous, and there was onlyone of them that would bite, and he would not bite if you would take himup close behind the ears, so that he could not get at you. The rest werevery good-natured, and would let you smooth them, or put them inside ofyour shirt-bosom, or anything. They would eat cabbage or bread or applesout of your hand; and it was fun to see their noses twitch. Otherwisethey had no accomplishments. All you could do with them was to tradewith other boys, or else keep the dogs from them; it was pretty excitingto keep the dogs from them. Tip was such a good dog that he neverdreamed of touching the rabbits. 

Of course these boys kept chickens. The favorite chicken in those dayswas a small white bantam, and the more feathers it had down its legs thebetter. My boy had a bantam hen that was perfectly white, and so tamethat she would run up to him whenever he came into the yard, and followhim round like a dog. When she had chickens she taught them to be justas fond of him, and the tiny little balls of yellow down tumbledfearlessly about in his hands, and pecked the crumbs of bread betweenhis fingers. As they got older they ran with their mother to meet him, and when he sat down on the grass they clambered over him and crept intohis shirt-bosom, and crooned softly, as they did when their motherhovered them. The boy loved them better than anything he ever had; healways saw them safe in the coop at night, and he ran out early in themorning to see how they had got through the night, and to feed them. Onefatal morning he found them all scattered dead upon the grass, themother and every one of her pretty chicks, with no sign upon them of howthey had been killed. He could only guess that they had fallen a prey torats, or to some owl that had got into their coop; but, as they had notbeen torn or carried away, he guessed in vain. He buried them with thesympathy of all the children and all the fellows at school who heardabout the affair. It was a real grief; it was long before he could thinkof his loss without tears; and I am not sure there is so much differenceof quality in our bereavements; the loss can hurt more or it can hurtless, but the pang must be always the same in kind. 

Besides his goat, my boy's brother kept pigeons, which, again, were likethe goat and the rabbits in not being of very much use. They had to bemuch more carefully looked after than chickens when they were young, they were so helpless in their nests, such mere weak wads of featherlessflesh. At first you had to open their bills and poke the food in; andyou had to look out how you gave them water for fear you would drownthem; but when they got a little larger they would drink and eat fromyour mouth; and that was some pleasure, for they did not seem to knowyou from an old pigeon when you took your mouth full of corn or waterand fed them. Afterwards, when they began to fly, it was a good deal offun to keep them, and make more cots for them, and build them nests inthe cots. 

But they were not very intelligent pets; hardly more intelligent thanthe fish that the boys kept in the large wooden hogshead of rain-waterat the corner of the house. They had caught some of these fish when theywere quite small, and the fish grew very fast, for there was plenty offood for them in the mosquito-tadpoles that abounded in the hogshead. Then, the boys fed them every day with bread-crumbs and worms. There wasone big sunfish that was not afraid of anything; if you held a worm justover him he would jump out of the water and snatch it. Besides the fish, there was a turtle in the hogshead, and he had a broad chip that heliked to sun himself on. It was fun to watch him resting on this chip, with his nose barely poked out of his shell, and his eyes, with the skindropped over them, just showing. He had some tricks: he would snap at astick if you teased him with it, and would let you lift him up by it. That was a good deal of pleasure. 

But all these were trifling joys, except maybe Tip and Nanny, comparedwith the pony which the boys owned in common, and which was the greatestthing that ever came into their lives. I cannot tell just how theirfather came to buy it for them, or where he got it; but I dare say hethought they were about old enough for a pony, and might as well haveone. It was a Mexican pony, and as it appeared on the scene just afterthe Mexican war, some volunteer may have brought it home. One volunteerbrought home a Mexican dog, that was smooth and hairless, with a skinlike an elephant, and that was always shivering round with the cold; hewas not otherwise a remarkable dog, and I do not know that he ever felteven the warmth of friendship among the boys; his manners were reservedand his temper seemed doubtful. But the pony never had any trouble withthe climate of Southern Ohio (which is indeed hot enough to fry asalamander in summer); and though his temper was no better than otherponies', he was perfectly approachable. I mean that he was approachablefrom the side, for it was not well to get where he could bite you orkick you. He was of a bright sorrel color, and he had a brand on onehaunch. My boy had an ideal of a pony, conceived from pictures in hisreading-books at school, that held its head high and arched its neck, and he strove by means of checks and martingales to make this real ponyconform to the illustrations. But it was of no use; the real pony heldhis neck straight out like a ewe, or, if reined up, like a camel, and hehung his big head at the end of it with no regard whatever for theideal. His caparison was another mortification and failure. What theboy wanted was an English saddle, embroidered on the morocco seat incrimson silk, and furnished with shining steel stirrups. What he had wasthe framework of a Mexican saddle, covered with rawhide, and cushionedwith a blanket; the stirrups were Mexican too, and clumsily fashionedout of wood. The boys were always talking about getting their father toget them a pad, but they never did it, and they managed as they couldwith the saddle they had. For the most part they preferred to ride thepony barebacked, for then they could ride him double, and when theyfirst got him they all wanted to ride him so much that they had to ridehim double. They kept him going the whole day long; but after a whilethey calmed down enough to take him one at a time, and to let him have achance for his meals. 

They had no regular stable, and the father left the boys to fit part ofthe cow-shed up for the pony, which they did by throwing part of thehen-coop open into it. The pigeon-cots were just over his head, and henever could have complained of being lonesome. At first everybody wantedto feed him as well as ride him, and if he had been allowed time for ithe might have eaten himself to death, or if he had not always tried tobite you or kick you when you came in with his corn. After a while theboys got so they forgot him, and nobody wanted to go out and feed thepony, especially after dark; but he knew how to take care of himself, and when he had eaten up everything there was in the cow-shed he wouldbreak out and eat up everything there was in the yard. 

The boys got lots of good out of him. When you were once on his back youwere pretty safe, for he was so lazy that he would not think of runningaway, and there was no danger unless he bounced you off when he trotted;he had a hard trot. The boys wanted to ride him standing up, likecircus-actors, and the pony did not mind, but the boys could not stayon, though they practised a good deal, turn about, when the otherfellows were riding their horses, standing up, on the Commons. He wasnot of much more use in Indian fights, for he could seldom be lashedinto a gallop, and a pony that proposed to walk through an Indian fightwas ridiculous. Still, with the help of imagination, my boy employed himin some scenes of wild Arab life, and hurled the Moorish javelin fromhim in mid-career, when the pony was flying along at the mad pace of acanal-boat. The pony early gave the boys to understand that they couldget very little out of him in the way of herding the family cow. Hewould let them ride him to the pasture, and he would keep up with thecow on the way home, when she walked, but if they wanted anything morethan that they must get some other pony. They tried to use him incarrying papers, but the subscribers objected to having him ridden up totheir front doors over the sidewalk, and they had to give it up. 

When he became an old story, and there was no competition for him amongthe brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him inthe wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He didnot like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy whowas learning the trade in his father's printing-office. This boy wasjust between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the goodcomrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them, and my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common thatwere not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, and they both began to write historical romances. My boy's romance wasfounded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of againand again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors, and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have givenalmost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some daysallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with anArabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the meantime he didwhat he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woodswith the other boy, who used to get his father's horse when he was notusing it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wildgrape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river, their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world thatcould never come true. 

XIII. 

GUNS AND GUNNING. 

ALL round the Boy's Town stood the forest, with the trees that must havebeen well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from theirshadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets andhouses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where thewoods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not verydense, and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more liketrees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or noundergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket; and there weresometimes grassy spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched theirpretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time, it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grassthat took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness with animage of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely myconjecture, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall offorest that enclosed the Boy's Town was without a break except where theaxe had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but, nearer or farther, the forest encompassed the town, and it called theboys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by itsshore, with mysterious, alluring voices, kindling the blood, taking thesoul with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy'sTown who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in thewoods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running offthe forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love ofsolitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastesof the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and iftheir ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it wasbecause their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was theirideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they wouldgo farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do notremember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived toohopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented themarine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just assoon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just beenopened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, whilea salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you hadset in the river that ran before the log-cabin. 

[Illustration: "ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE. "]

If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anythingelse, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they werewilling to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixedmind about them in the meantime, but perhaps they were not unlike otheridolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they camepretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer thanthey knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites andthe Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to beBritish when there were Americans on the other side; in either case youhad to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of sometime seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in thecircus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of themdreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was atthe arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from theWyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the state, on their wayto new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have knownthat these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most offathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once therethe Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out ofheaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets andmoccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squattingin groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures. The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys hadbows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed theIndians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went upto the court-house yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows. It almost made the boys crazy. 

Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, orsome game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents andbits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indianswould all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit ithad the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back thearrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they livedthrough it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; hecould only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom herevered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would havebeen too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three ofthe Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy's Town boys said they weregirls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of sixor seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men werenot a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did notenter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sageswho shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and theboys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of aworld where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and rangingthe woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alonemake men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish personsdo among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escapethem they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merelysavage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilizedman is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indiansaway into the far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for therest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did nottry it. After the red men had flitted away like red leaves their memoryremained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged amongthem, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their olddesire of having a gun. 

But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire ofevery boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy, and there weremighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point, a pistol would do, especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot outof it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and justas likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must notshoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could getthem anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol wasalways a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even aboard fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something. Very few boysever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But sevenor eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-aboutshooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but theycould run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired, and that was something. This was my boy's privilege for a long timebefore he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elderbrother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shootthe load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed tobring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe foranything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going todo. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy's brotherbought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-realpiece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmithand a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time;perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in theirleisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part payfor their papers. When they got through with it my boy's brother madehimself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least asstraight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had alittle twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was afirst-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself apowder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft(it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece ofglass; it hung at his side; and he carried his shot in his pantaloonspocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he hadnever shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smoothbore rifle, and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been nearlyten years old. It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have agun; but he was mortified the very next morning after he got it by acitizen who thought differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out andshoot kildees on the Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun onhis shoulder when the citizen stopped him and asked him what he wasgoing to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added thatit was his gun. This seemed to surprise the citizen even more than theboy could have wished. He asked him if he did not think he was a prettysmall boy to have a gun; and he took the gun from him, and examined itthoughtfully, and then handed it back to the boy, who felt himselfgetting smaller all the time. The man went his way without sayinganything more, but his behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boyhad no pleasure in his sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because hefound no kildees to shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gunonce or twice at a fence, and then he sneaked home with it throughalleys and by-ways, and whenever he met a person he hurried by for fearthe person would find him too small to have a gun. 

Afterwards he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went huntingwith it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snapa good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; andsometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and gooff, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder. The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this wasnot the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could notshut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aimwith both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till oneday when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blowover his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye wasput out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cutabove it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at apump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. Itsuddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now, and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; byhelp of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himselfpresentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and wentjoyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure ithad not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurriedhome to share the joyful news with his family. He went hunting the verynext Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was asuicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so closethat it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a fewfeathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, heshowed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit withthe minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eatthis sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you took its poor little lifemerely for the pleasure of killing it, " said the father. "Was it a greatpleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his head in shame and silence; itseemed to him that he would never go hunting again. Of course he did gohunting often afterwards, but his brother and he kept faithfully to therule of never killing anything that they did not want to eat. To besure, they gave themselves a wide range; they were willing to eat almostanything that they could shoot, even blackbirds, which were so abundantand so easy to shoot. But there were some things which they would havethought it not only wanton but wicked to kill, like turtle-doves, whichthey somehow believed were sacred, because they were the symbols of theHoly Ghost; it was quite their own notion to hold them sacred. Theywould not kill robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they kept about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed ashame to shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were theturtle-doves, which used to light on the basin-bank, and pick up thegrain scattered there from the boats and wagons. One of the apprenticesin the printing-office kept a shot-gun loaded beside the press while hewas rolling, and whenever he caught the soft twitter that the doves makewith their wings, he rushed out with his gun and knocked over two orthree of them. He was a good shot, and could nearly always get them inrange. When he brought them back, it seemed to my boy that he hadcommitted the unpardonable sin, and that something awful would surelyhappen to him. But he just kept on rolling the forms of type andexchanging insults with the pressman; and at the first faint twitter ofdoves' wings he would be off again. 

My boy and his brother made a fine distinction between turtle-doves andwild pigeons; they would have killed wild pigeons if they had got achance, though you could not tell them from turtle-doves except by theirsize and the sound they made with their wings. But there were not manypigeons in the woods around the Boy's Town, and they were very shy. There were snipe along the river, and flocks of kildees on the Commons, but the bird that was mostly killed by these boys was the yellowhammer. They distinguished, again, in its case; and decided that it was not awoodpecker, and might be killed; sometimes they thought that woodpeckerswere so nearly yellowhammers that they might be killed, but they hadnever heard of any one's eating a woodpecker, and so they could notquite bring themselves to it. There were said to be squirrels in thehickory woods near the Poor-House, but that was a great way off for myboy; besides the squirrels, there was a cross bull in those woods, andsometimes Solomon Whistler passed through them on his way to or from thePoor-House; so my boy never hunted squirrels. Sometimes he went with hisbrother for rabbits, which you could track through the corn-fields in alight snow, and sometimes, if they did not turn out to be cats, youcould get a shot at them. Now and then there were quail in thewheat-stubble, and there were meadow-larks in the pastures, but theywere very wild. 

After all, yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase; they werepre-occupied, unsuspecting birds, and lit on fence rails and dead trees, so that they were pretty easy to shoot. If you could bring home ayellowhammer you felt that you had something to show for your long day'stramp through the woods and fields, and for the five cents' worth ofpowder and five cents' worth of shot that you had fired off at othergame. Sometimes you just fired it off at mullein-stalks, or barns, oranything you came to. There were a good many things you could do with agun; you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through theair; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, andsend the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believedthat you could fire that column of water right through a man, and theyalways wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they wereafraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal ofpleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuckin it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into themuzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; thenyou wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiledit with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw, and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder inat the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the oldmuzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays. 

But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired andfootsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as youcame in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit forsupper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy's motherever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind ofpreserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly takethe time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before yourushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you leftit with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and savedyou the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good dealquicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly. 

Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late, was the pleasureof starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shootducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had analarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant itrang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayedthan shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashesoff the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked andbristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on theirclothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns. Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to knowthey were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, andtwisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tailoff; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns allover; he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they weregoing, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, andled the way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks onthe grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild clamorouscries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back withmy boy and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right tothe first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and creptalong to the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold onTip's collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning. The place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that palelight, and he was glad of old Tip's company, for it seemed a time whenthere might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet ofsmooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, andthrough these at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro, and he could catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood stilland then jumped wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled withthe rush of wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocksarriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopeshe will lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he betthat he did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got ashot at them, they would not come back so that he could get a chancehimself to kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, andjust when he was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the duckswere, the old smoothbore sent out a red flash and a white puff before heheard the report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard thesplashing rise of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; andhe ran forward, yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Whereare you? Are they coming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcrythat would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less aflock of ducks. 

One shot always ended the morning's sport, and there were always goodreasons why this shot never killed anything. 

XIV. 

FORAGING. 

THE foraging began with the first relenting days of winter, whichusually came in February. Then the boys began to go to the woods to getsugar-water, as they called the maple sap, and they gave whole Saturdaysto it as long as the sap would run. It took at least five or six boys togo for sugar-water, and they always had to get a boy whose father had anauger to come along, so as to have something to bore the trees with. Ontheir way to the woods they had to stop at an elder thicket to getelder-wood to make spiles of, and at a straw pile to cut straws to suckthe sap through, if the spiles would not work. They always brought lotsof tin buckets to take the sap home in, and the big boys made the littlefellows carry these, for they had to keep their own hands free towhittle the elder sticks into the form of spouts, and to push the pithout and make them hollow. They talked loudly and all at once, and theyran a good deal of the way, from the excitement. If it was a goodsugar-day, there were patches of snow still in the fence corners andshady places, which they searched for rabbit-tracks; but the air was sowarm that they wanted to take their shoes off, and begin going barefootat once. Overhead, the sky was a sort of pale, milky blue, with the sunburning softly through it, and casting faint shadows. When they gotinto the woods, it was cooler, and there were more patches of snow, withbird-tracks and squirrel-tracks in them. They could hear the blue-jayssnarling at one another, and the yellowhammer chuckling; on some deadtree a redheaded woodpecker hammered noisily, and if the boys had onlyhad a gun with them they could have killed lots of things. Now and thenthey passed near some woodchoppers, whose axes made a pleasant sound, without frightening any of the wild things, they had got so used tothem; sometimes the boys heard the long hollow crash of a tree they werefelling. But all the time they kept looking out for a good sugar-tree, and when they saw a maple stained black from the branches down with thesap running from the little holes that the sap-suckers had made, theyburst into a shout, and dashed forward, and the fellow with the augerbegan to bore away, while the other fellows stood round and told himhow, and wanted to make him let them do it. Up and down the tree therewas a soft murmur from the bees that had found it out before the boys, and every now and then they wove through the air the straight lines oftheir coming and going, and made the fellows wish they could find abee-tree. But for the present these were intent upon the sugar-tree, andkept hurrying up the boy with the auger. When he had bored in deepenough, they tried to fit a spile to the hole, but it was nearly alwayscrooked and too big, or else it pointed downward and the water would notrun up through the spile. Then some of them got out their straws, andbegan to suck the sap up from the hole through them, and to quarrel andpush, till they agreed to take turn-about, and others got the auger andbunted for another blackened tree. They never could get their spiles towork, and the water gathered so slowly in the holes they bored, and someof the fellows took such long turns, that it was very little fun. Theytried to get some good out of the small holes the sap-suckers had made, but there were only a few drops in them, mixed with bark and moss. If ithad not been for the woodchoppers, foraging for sugar-water would alwayshave been a failure; but one of them was pretty sure to come up with hisaxe in his hand, and show the boys how to get the water. He would chooseone of the roots near the foot of the tree, and chop a clean, squarehole in it; the sap flew at each stroke of his axe, and it rose so fastin the well he made that the thirstiest boy could not keep it down, andthree or four boys, with their heads jammed tight together and theirstraws plunged into its depths, lay stretched upon their stomachs anddrank their fill at once. When every one was satisfied, or as nearlysatisfied as a boy can ever be, they began to think how they could carrysome of the sugar-water home. But by this time it would be pretty latein the afternoon; and they would have to put it off till some other day, when they intended to bring something to dip the water out with; thebuckets they had brought were all too big. Then, if they could getenough, they meant to boil it down and make sugar-wax. I never knew ofany boys who did so. 

The next thing after going for sugar-water was gathering may-apples, asthey called the fruit of the mandrake in that country. They grew totheir full size, nearly as large as a pullet's egg, some time in June, and they were gathered green, and carried home to be ripened in thecornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they wereripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sourthing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in thepleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade ofthe trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyoussense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of thesweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boycomes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in thewealth she never grudges to those who are willing to be merely richenough. 

There were not many wild berries in the country near the Boy's Town, orwhat seemed near; but sometimes my boy's father took him a great way offto a region, long lost from the map, where there were blackberries. Theswimming lasted so late into September, however, that the boys began togo for nuts almost as soon as they left off going into the water. Theybegan with the little acorns that they called chinquepins, and that weresuch a pretty black, streaked upward from the cup with yellow, that theygathered them half for the unconscious pleasure of their beauty. Theywere rather bitter, and they puckered your mouth; but still you atethem. They were easy to knock off the low oaks where they grew, and theywere so plentiful that you could get a peck of them in no time. Therewas no need of anybody's climbing a tree to shake them; but one day theboys got to telling what they would do if a bear came, and one of themclimbed a chinquepin-tree to show how he would get out on such a smalllimb that the bear would be afraid to follow him; and he went so far outon the limb that it broke under him. Perhaps he was heavier than hewould have been if he had not been carrying the load of guilt whichmust burden a boy who is playing hookey. At any rate, he fell to theground, and lay there helpless while the other boys gathered round him, and shared all the alarm he felt for his life. His despair of now hidingthe fact that he had been playing hookey was his own affair, but theyreasoned with him that the offence would be overlooked in the anxietywhich his disaster must arouse. He was prepared to make the most ofthis, and his groans grew louder as he drew near home in the arms of theboys who took turns, two and two, in carrying him the whole long wayfrom Dayton Lane, with a terrified procession of alternates behind them. These all ran as soon as they came in sight of his house and left thelast pair to deliver him to his mother. They never knew whether sheforgave him fully, or merely waited till he got well. You never couldtell how a boy's mother was going to act in any given case; mothers wereso very apt to act differently. 

Red haws came a little before chinquepins. The trees grew mostly by theFirst Lock, and the boys gathered the haws when they came out fromswimming in the canal. They did not take bags to gather haws, as theydid chinquepins; the fruit was not thought worthy of that honor; butthey filled their pockets with them and ate them on the way home. Theywere rather nice, with a pleasant taste between a small apple and a roseseed-pod; only you had to throw most of them away because they werewormy. Once when the fellows were gathering haws out there they began tohave fun with a flock of turkeys, especially the gobblers, and one boygot an old gobbler to following him while he walked slowly backward, andteased him. The other boys would not have told him for anything whenthey saw him backing against a low stump. When he reached it, his headwent down and his heels flew into the air, and then the gobbler hoppedupon him and began to have some of the fun himself. The boys alwaysthought that if they had not rushed up all together and scared thegobbler off, he would have torn the boy to pieces, but very likely hewould not. He probably intended just to have fun with him. 

The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts, and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitterkernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, butthe boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people. Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of blackwalnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks, as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to gowalnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether theywere ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, thefellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thoughtnecessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, andthat a boy had to make a new wagon every year. No boy's walnut wagoncould last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till thenext day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He coulduse a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use ahatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use hisknife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very roundthen; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. Hewhittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. Hecould get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened tothe wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he couldnot get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holesthrough the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them largeenough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, becauseany other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was alwayssplitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; thewheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailedacross the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of astreet to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting. 

[Illustration: FORAGING. ]

When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with hisbrothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. Hestarted early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the froststill bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-topsand the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to getthere before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for themwas in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, andaround them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts layscattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some stillyellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up tothe nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen, wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped fromthe trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against theblue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallenfruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send themplumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, andthe nuts almost leaped into the boys' hands. The boys ran, some of themto gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beatthem from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick offhis shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut wasstill clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile ofgrape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blowsof a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, wherethe grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss theminto a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk ofthat they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain ontheir hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed fordays that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining oneanother's faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians. 

The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, andwhile the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter andhotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every oneof them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they wouldstart homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and theirshoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had goodluck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gonehome with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so Ihave to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnutsrattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of thewagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they alwayswould in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready todrop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubsor rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to getthe nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because theyusually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made justas much preparation for drying the nuts on the wood-shed roof whetherthey got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stopgathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleatacross the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them outthin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. Theysaid they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to trypretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and inabout three days they were all eaten up. 

I dare say boys are very different nowadays, and do everything they saythey are going to do, and carry out all their undertakings. But in thatday they never carried out any of their undertakings. Perhaps theyundertook too much; but the failure was a part of the pleasure ofundertaking a great deal, and if they had not failed they would haveleft nothing for the men to do; and a more disgusting thing than a worldfull of idle men who had done everything there was to do while they wereboys, I cannot imagine. The fact is, boys _have_ to leave a little formen to do, or else the race would go to ruin; and this almost makes mehalf believe that perhaps even the boys of the present time may beprevented from doing quite as much as they think they are going to do, until they grow up. Even then they may not want to do it all, but only asmall part of it. I have noticed that men do not undertake half so manythings as boys do; and instead of wanting to be circus-actors andIndians, and soldiers, and boat-drivers, and politicians and robbers, and to run off, and go in swimming all the time, and out hunting andwalnutting, they keep to a very few things, and are glad then if theycan do them. It is very curious, but it is true; and I advise any boywho doubts it to watch his father awhile. 

XV. 

MY BOY. 

EVERY boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds ofboys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming manycharacters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and onecharacter when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onionwhen he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peelingoff, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart, at last, and then you have got down to nothing. 

All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having eachan inward being that was not the least like their outward being, butthat somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so ornot. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while hewas joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage usagesof the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly differentworld within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not tell nowthese wonders any more than he could have told them then; but it was aworld of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have been moreashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was allvague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and thatfilled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof withtheir charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not lurehim wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when theirenchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of themafterwards. First of them was Goldsmith's "History of Greece, " whichmade him an Athenian of Pericles's time, and Goldsmith's "History ofRome, " which naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed inslaying tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time ofDomitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he hadread these books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his fatherthought fit to put into his hands "The Travels of Captain Ashe in NorthAmerica, " to encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for usefulreading; but this was a failure. The captain's travels were printed withlong esses, and the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons. The fancy nourished upon

 "The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome, "

starved amidst the robust plenty of the Englishman's criticisms of ourearly manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read"Malte-Brun's Geography, " in three large folios, of a thousand pageseach, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from thefather, who had never been able to read it himself. But shortly after hefailed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came into possession of apriceless treasure. It was that little treatise on "Greek and RomanMythology" which I have mentioned, and which he must literally have wornout with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived hisboyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father boughtit with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who hadabout that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part ofhis grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in manytransfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero uponimagined occasions in the Boy's Town, to the fancied admiration of allthe other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to hisgrandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollowith his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and restingfrom his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that hisgrandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, andshow them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she wasa girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed theywould make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubthe was right. 

There was another book which he read about this time, and that was "TheGreek Soldier. " It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian, who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks, and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures. They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present atthe Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French, and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that hecould not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks, when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to consolehimself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the warover again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle bysleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the childrenoften fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and hispreparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in itspractical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour. 

Captain Riley's narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, andhis captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brotherprized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told themthat he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get hisappointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was namedWilliam Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, WilliamWillshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed tothem almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly agreater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Rileyand kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could. Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesquethan the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had avein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm, and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was notwithout its effect with the boys. 

Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the samerace and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the"Arabian Nights. " They did not think whether these were Mohammedans ornot; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys arecitizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as theylived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that RobinsonCrusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the placeit ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had afeeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself theaccomplice of an impostor. He liked the "Arabian Nights, " but oddlyenough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as thestories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name ofthis book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of hisreading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, whenhe was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out ofhis possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it;at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knewwhat book it was till thirty years afterwards, when he picked up from afriend's library-table a copy of "Gesta Romanorum, " and recognized inthis collection of old monkish legends the long-missing treasure of hisboyhood. These stories, without beauty of invention, without art ofconstruction or character, without spirituality in their crudematerialization, which were read aloud in the refectories of mediævalcloisters while the monks sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of theboy that governed his life. He conformed his conduct to the principlesand maxims which actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of thesedry-as-dust tales; he went about drunk with the fumes of fables aboutRoman emperors that never were, in an empire that never was; and, thoughthey tormented him by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in theplace of that he knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to breakfrom their influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing tohappen to him as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying orprophecy; and at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies forhimself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he waswalking in an alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap thathad probably fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in his simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as hepicked it up there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up thiscap picketh up a fortune, " and he could hardly wait for Monday to comeand let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduringprosperity in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expectedthis to take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost allcourage; his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could notutter a syllable of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid thecap on the counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took itin his hand. "What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours, " and he tossedthe cap into a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunkout, cut to the heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a crueldisappointment and mortification that it was rather a relief to have hisbrother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, "He who pickethup this cap picketh up a fortune, " and then split into a jeering laugh. At least he could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him;and he could throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jourprinters when the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "Hewho picketh--"

He was not different from other boys in his desire to localize, torealize, what he read; and he was always contriving in fancy scenes andencounters of the greatest splendor, in which he bore a chief part. Inwardly he was all thrones, principalities, and powers, the foe oftyrants, the friend of good emperors, and the intimate of magicians, andmagnificently apparelled; outwardly he was an incorrigible littlesloven, who suffered in all social exigencies from the direstbashfulness, and wished nothing so much as to shrink out of the sight ofmen if they spoke to him. He could not help revealing sometimes to thekindness of his father and mother the world of foolish dreams one halfof him lived in, while the other half swam, and fished, and hunted, andran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled inthe Boy's Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they lethim know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his tasteas far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry, but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems hisfather read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certainpieces by heart, like "The Turk lay dreaming of the hour, " and "Pity thesorrows of a poor old man, " and he was fond of some passages that hisfather wished him to know in Thomson's "Seasons. " There were some ofMoore's songs, too, that he was fond of, such as "When in death I shallcalm recline, " and "It was noon and on flowers that ranged all around. "He learned these by heart, to declaim at school, where he spoke, "On thebanks of the Danube fair Adelaide hied, " from Campbell; but he couldhardly speak the "Soldier's Dream" for the lump that came into histhroat at the lines, "My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er, And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart. 

 "'Stay, stay with us! Stay! Thou art weary and worn!' And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay; But sorrow returned at the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away!"

He was himself both the war-broken soldier and the little ones thatkissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he wokewith pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer. 

But he could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did noteven try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil whichhis father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the smallcopperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion tohim. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village, " and he formed agreat passion for Pope's "Pastorals, " which he imitated in their easyheroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine, he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. Hisfather used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, likethe taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he nevercame to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he alwayshad his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as theypretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, adelicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chiefdish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make longpoems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read otherpeople's long poems. 

He had no conception of authorship as a vocation in life, and he didnot know why he wanted to make poetry. After first flaunting his skillin it before the boys, and getting one of them into trouble by writing alove-letter for him to a girl at school, and making the girl cry at athing so strange and puzzling as a love-letter in rhyme, he preferred toconceal his gift. It became

 "His shame in crowds--his solitary pride, "

and he learned to know that it was considered _soft_ to write poetry, asindeed it mostly is. He himself regarded with contempt a young man whohad printed a piece of poetry in his father's newspaper and put his ownname to it. He did not know what he would not have done sooner thanprint poetry and put his name to it; and he was melted with confusionwhen a girl who was going to have a party came to him at theprinting-office and asked him to make her the invitations in verse. Theprinters laughed, and it seemed to the boy that he could never get overit. 

But such disgraces are soon lived down, even at ten years, and a greatnew experience which now came to him possibly helped the boy to forget. This was the theatre, which he had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been a theatre in the Boy's Town, when a strollingcompany came up from Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an emptypork-house. But that was a long time ago, and, though he had written atragedy, all that the boy knew of a theatre was from a picture in aSunday-school book where a stage scene was given to show what kind ofdesperate amusements a person might come to in middle life if he beganby breaking the Sabbath in his youth. His brother had once been taken toa theatre in Pittsburgh by one of their river-going uncles, and heoften told about it; but my boy formed no conception of the beautifulreality from his accounts of a burglar who jumped from a roof and waschased by a watchman with a pistol up and down a street with housespainted on a curtain. 

[Illustration: "THE BEACON OF DEATH. "]

The company which came to the Boy's Town in his time was again fromCincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother oftwo actresses, afterwards famous, who were then children, just startingupon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading partsin "Bombastes Furioso, " the first night my boy ever saw a play, and heinstantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitlyremained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller ofthem came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawnsword in the other, and said, "Whoever dares these boots displace Shall meet Bombastes face to face, "

if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodramapreceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate whofought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down--click-click, click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in theopening piece. This was called the "Beacon of Death, " and the scenerepresented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern danglingfrom the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom. Afterwards, the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of thedialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captainappeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us go below andget some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss tohave been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longedto be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he soglutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at thetheatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it, and avoided theplays and novels that had very marked villains in them. 

He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and helived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which waswell on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly putthe public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money'sworth with three. On his first night my boy saw "The Beacon of Death, ""Bombastes Furioso, " and "Black-eyed Susan, " and he never afterwards sawless than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as longas the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainlyCalvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most goodpeople as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long hedwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with moreeffulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before, and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like thosevillains on the stage, to have a moustache--a black moustache--such asthey wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, andsomehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain. 

I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of tenyears; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was, he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery;and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough ofvillainy, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. At any rate, it was a phase of being that could not have been prevented withoutliterally destroying him, and I feel pretty sure that his father didwell to let him have his fill of the theatre at once. He could not haveknown of the riot of emotions behind the child's shy silence, or howcontinually he was employed in dealing death to all the good people inthe pieces he saw or imagined. This the boy could no more have sufferedto appear than his passion for those lovely little girls, for whose sakehe somehow perpetrated these wicked deeds. The theatre bills, large andsmall, were printed in his father's office, and sometimes the amiablemanager and his wife strolled in with the copy. The boy always wildlyhoped and feared they would bring the little girls with them, but theynever did, and he contented himself with secretly adoring the father andmother, doubly divine as their parents and as actors. They were on easyterms with the roller-boy, the wretch who shot turtle-doves with noregard for their symbolical character, and they joked with him, in alight give-and-take that smote my boy with an anguish of envy. It wouldhave been richly enough for him to pass the least word with them; alook, a smile from them would have been bliss; but he shrank out oftheir way; and once when he met them in the street, and they seemed tobe going to speak to him, he ran so that they could not. 

XVI. 

OTHER BOYS. 

I CANNOT quite understand why the theatre, which my boy was so full of, and so fond of, did not inspire him to write plays, to pour them out, tragedy upon tragedy, till the world was filled with tears and blood. Perhaps it was because his soul was so soaked, and, as it were, water-logged with the drama, that it could only drift sluggishly in thatwelter of emotions, and make for no point, no port, where it couldrecover itself and direct its powers again. The historical romance whichhe had begun to write before the impassioned days of the theatre seemsto have been lost sight of at this time, though it was an enterprisethat he was so confident of carrying forward that he told all his familyand friends about it, and even put down the opening passages of it onpaper which he cut in large quantity, and ruled himself, so as to haveit exactly suitable. The story, as I have said, was imagined from eventsin Irving's history of the "Conquest of Granada, " a book which the boyloved hardly less than the monkish legends of "Gesta Romanorum, " and itconcerned the rival fortunes of Hamet el Zegri and Boabdil el Chico, theuncle and nephew who vied with each other for the crumbling throne ofthe Moorish kingdom; but I have not the least notion how it all ended. Perhaps the boy himself had none. 

I wish I could truly say that he finished any of his literaryundertakings, but I cannot. They were so many that they cumbered thehouse, and were trodden under foot; and sometimes they brought him toopen shame, as when his brother picked one of them up, and began to readit out loud with affected admiration. He was apt to be ashamed of hisliterary efforts after the first moment, and he shuddered at hisbrother's burlesque of the high romantic vein in which most of hisneverended beginnings were conceived. One of his river-faring uncles wasvisiting with his family at the boy's home when he laid out the schemeof his great fiction of "Hamet el Zegri, " and the kindly young aunt tookan interest in it which he poorly rewarded a few months later, when sheasked how the story was getting on, and he tried to ignore the wholematter, and showed such mortification at the mention of it that the poorlady was quite bewildered. 

The trouble with him was, that he had to live that kind of double life Ihave spoken of--the Boy's Town life and the Cloud Dweller's life--andthat the last, which he was secretly proud of, abashed him before thefirst. This is always the way with double-lived people, but he did notknow it, and he stumbled along through the glory and the ignominy asbest he could, and, as he thought, alone. 

He was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elder brother ofhis; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have a brotherabout four years older than yourself, I should say; and if your temperis hot, and your disposition revengeful, and you are a vain andridiculous dreamer at the same time that you are eager to excel in featsof strength and games of skill, and to do everything that the otherfellows do, and are ashamed to be better than the worst boy in thecrowd, your brother can be of the greatest use to you, with his largerexperience and wisdom. My boy's brother seemed to have an ideal ofusefulness, while my boy only had an ideal of glory, to wish to helpothers, while my boy only wished to help himself. My boy would as soonhave thought of his father's doing a wrong thing as of his brother'sdoing it; and his brother was a calm light of common-sense, of justice, of truth, while he was a fantastic flicker of gaudy purposes which hewished to make shine before men in their fulfilment. His brother wasalways doing for him and for the younger children; while my boy only didfor himself; he had a very gray moustache before he began to have anyconception of the fact that he was sent into the world to serve and tosuffer, as well as to rule and enjoy. But his brother seemed to knowthis instinctively; he bore the yoke in his youth, patiently if notwillingly; he shared the anxieties as he parted the cares of his fatherand mother. Yet he was a boy among boys, too; he loved to swim, toskate, to fish, to forage, and passionately, above all, he loved tohunt; but in everything he held himself in check, that he might hold theyounger boys in check; and my boy often repaid his conscientiousvigilance with hard words and hard names, such as embitter even the mostself-forgiving memories. He kept mechanically within certain laws, andthough in his rage he hurled every other name at his brother, he wouldnot call him a fool, because then he would be in danger of hell-fire. Ifhe had known just what Raca meant, he might have called him Raca, for hewas not so much afraid of the council; but, as it was, his brotherescaped that insult, and held through all a rein upon him, and governedhim through his scruples as well as his fears. 

His brother was full of inventions and enterprises beyond most otherboys, and his undertakings came to the same end of nothingness thatawaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them;he meant to raise silk-worms; he prepared to take the contract ofclearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out withgunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for makingmoney, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up intostove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The onlytrouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boyshad a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they wouldrather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a goodmany other schemes for getting rich, that failed; and he wanted to go toCalifornia and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He reallydid save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after along rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, whohad the firebells rung. The fire companies came rushing to the rescue, but as they could not put the Basin out with their engines, they all gotshovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowedthe street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The waterstood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy's house, and the yard wasflooded so that the boys made rafts and navigated it for a whole day. Myboy's brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots of fellowsfell off the rafts. 

He belonged to a military company of big boys that had real wooden guns, such as the little boys never could get, and silk oil-cloth caps, andnankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down thelegs; and once they marched out to a boy's that had a father that had afarm, and he gave them all a free dinner in an arbor before the house;bread and butter, and apple-butter, and molasses and pound cake, andpeaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about theMexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got afarmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy placethere was near a piece of woods, where a good many cows were pastured. They took the pieces of sod, and built them up into the walls of a fortabout fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than theirheads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they couldnot wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the wallsonly breast high. There were going to be two parties: one to attack thefort, and the other to defend it, and they were just going to throwsods; but one boy had a real shot-gun, that he was to load up withpowder and fire off when the battle got to the worst, so as to have itmore like a battle. He thought it would be more like yet if he put in afew shot, and he did it on his own hook. It was a splendid gun, but itwould not stand cocked long, and he was resting it on the wall of thefort, ready to fire when the storming-party came on, throwing sods andyelling and holloing; and all at once his gun went off, and a cow thatwas grazing broadside to the fort gave a frightened bellow, and put upher tail, and started for home. When they found out that the gun, ifnot the boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took totheir heels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as thatcow got home, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she hadbeen shot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that hedid not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed thoseboys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to theirfort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remainedupon another. 

My boy's brother had a good many friends who were too old for my boy toplay with. One of them had a father that had a flour-mill out at theFirst Lock, and for a while my boy's brother intended to be a miller. Ido not know why he gave up being one; he did stay up all night with hisfriend in the mill once, and he found out that the water has more powerby night than by day, or at least he came to believe so. He knew anotherboy who had a father who had a stone-quarry and a canal-boat to bringthe stone to town. It was a scow, and it was drawn by one horse;sometimes he got to drive the horse, and once he was allowed to steerthe boat. This was a great thing, and it would have been hard to believeof anybody else. The name of the boy that had the father that owned thisboat was Piccolo; or, rather, that was his nickname, given him becausehe could whistle like a piccolo-flute. Once the fellows were disputingwhether you could jump halfway across a narrow stream, and then jumpback, without touching your feet to the other shore. Piccolo tried it, and sat down in the middle of the stream. 

My boy's brother had a scheme for preserving ripe fruit, by sealing itup in a stone jug and burying the jug in the ground, and not digging itup till Christmas. He tried it with a jug of cherries, which he dug upin about a week; but the cherries could not have smelt worse if they hadbeen kept till Christmas. He knew a boy that had a father that had abakery, and that used to let him come and watch them making bread. Therewas a fat boy learning the trade there, and they called him thedough-baby, because he looked so white and soft; and the boy whosefather had a mill said that down at the German brewery they had a Dutchboy that they were teaching to drink beer, so they could tell how muchbeer a person could drink if he was taken early; but perhaps this wasnot true. 

My boy's brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy togo to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boywho, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that wasthe boy who came to learn the trade in their father's printing-office, and who began an historical romance at the time my boy began his greatMoorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink thetypes, while my boy's brother worked the press, and all day long my boy, from where he was setting type, could hear him telling the story of abook he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was acount, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawingliterary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heardof. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a bookas the "Conquest of Granada, " or "Gesta Romanorum;" and for a time hekept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterwards they cametogether on "Don Quixote, " but though my boy came to have quite apassionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudgeagainst him for his knowledge of "Monte Cristo. " He was as great alaughter as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, sothat two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes andfun. He became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunesbut steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as aprivate soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely inmany battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, ever after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till he died not long ago at his post of duty--a true, generous, andlofty soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seemcommoner in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond ourmillionaires and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in theirnobly simple lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, wordfor word, deed for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that ofMonte Cristo, or any hero of romance; and so would the common story ofany common life; but we cannot tell these stories, somehow. 

My boy knew nearly a hundred boys, more or less; but it is no use tryingto tell about them, for all boys are a good deal alike, and most ofthese did not differ much from the rest. They were pretty good fellows;that is to say, they never did half the mischief they intended to do, and they had moments of intending to do right, or at least they thoughtthey did, and when they did wrong they said they did not intend to. Butmy boy never had any particular friend among his schoolmates, though heplayed and fought with them on intimate terms, and was a good comradewith any boy that wanted to go in swimming or out hunting. His closestfriend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than theopen fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I dare say it was asense of his kinship with nature that took my boy with him, and restedhis soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like apiece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or spinning inhim; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or aim. Helived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a corn-field onthe river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to find himthere, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or three largesisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the boys had verylittle to do with each other's houses, or, for that matter, with eachother's yards. His friend seldom entered my boy's gate, and never hisdoor; for with all the toleration his father felt for every manner ofhuman creature, he could not see what good the boy was to get from thisqueer companion. It is certain that, he got no harm; for his companionwas too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low asthe ground under foot, but morally he was as good as any boy in theBoy's Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no impulses at all, infact, and of his own motion he never did anything, or seemed to thinkanything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simply appeared in theneighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fence till he came out. He did not whistle, or call "E-oo-we!" as the other fellows did, butwaited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone off with wherever myboy listed. He never had any plans himself, and never any will but togo in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he did not even fish; andI suppose that money could not have hired him to run races. He playedmarbles, but not very well, and he did not care much for the game. Thetwo boys soaked themselves in the river together, and then they lay onthe sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; but my boy could nothave talked to him about any of the things that were in his books, orthe fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He must rather have soothedagainst his soft, caressing ignorance the ache of his fantastic spirit, and reposed his intensity of purpose in that lax and easy aimlessness. Their friendship was not only more innocent than any other friendship myboy had, but it was wholly innocent; they loved each other, and that wasall; and why people love one another there is never any satisfactorytelling. But this friend of his must have had great natural good in him;and if I could find a man of the make of that boy I am sure I shouldlove him. 

My boy's other friends wondered at his fondness for him, and it wasoften made a question with him at home, if not a reproach to him; sothat in the course of time it ceased to be that comfort it had been tohim. He could not give him up, but he could not help seeing that he wasignorant and idle, and in a fatal hour he resolved to reform him. I amnot able now to say just how he worked his friend up to the point ofcoming to school, and of washing his hands and feet and face, andputting on a new check shirt to come in. But one day he came, and myboy, as he had planned, took him into his seat, and owned his friendshipwith him before the whole school. This was not easy, for thougheverybody knew how much the two were together, it was a different thingto sit with him as if he thought him just as good as any boy, and tohelp him get his lessons, and stay him mentally as well as socially. Hestruggled through one day, and maybe another; but it was a failure fromthe first moment, and my boy breathed freer when his friend came onehalf-day, and then never came again. The attempted reform had spoiledtheir simple and harmless intimacy. They never met again upon the oldground of perfect trust and affection. Perhaps the kindly earth-spirithad instinctively felt a wound from the shame my boy had tried to braveout, and shrank from their former friendship without quite knowing why. Perhaps it was my boy who learned to realize that there could be littlein common but their common humanity between them, and could not go backto that. At any rate, their friendship declined from this point; and itseems to me, somehow, a pity. 

Among the boys who were between my boy and his brother in age was onewhom all the boys liked, because he was clever with everybody, withlittle boys as well as big boys. He was a laughing, pleasant fellow, always ready for fun, but he never did mean things, and he had an openface that made a friend of every one who saw him. He had a father thathad a house with a lightning-rod, so that if you were in it when therewas a thunder-storm you could not get struck by lightning, as my boyonce proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and notgetting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there weregrape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity, with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was afellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and heliked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever ashe was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows wantto go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boyone night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night withhis boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmareand walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you beforehe knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon hischances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; andso he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundestslumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy hadto go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up andgone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so onlybecause the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole familywas. 

It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went withbefore that boy who knew about "Monte Cristo" came to learn the trade intheir father's office. One Saturday in July they three spent the wholeday together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnutson the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to besweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchardthrown open for building-lots behind my boy's yard; but they could notfind any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought ofputting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind ofgreen apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They wentup to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in thebarrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold, and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened thepoints, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an applealmost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far asyou could see him. 

On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy wasnot there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, towardsthe end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, justbefore school let out, the teacher--it was the one that whipped so, andthat the fellows all liked--rapped on his desk, and began to speak verysolemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom theyhad played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick thatit was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lessonabout life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing anduncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need neverbe afraid to die. 

Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see thedying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to theearth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as thepillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed largeand strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys couldhear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, andthe light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knewthis one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room. 

In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school didnot keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walkedin the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the open grave, that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a holethrough the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe ontop of his monument. 

XVII. 

FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS. 

MY boy used to be afraid of this monument, which stood a long time, orwhat seemed to him a long time, in the yard of the tombstone cutterbefore it was put up at the grave of the philosopher who imagined theearth as hollow as much of the life is on it. He was a brave officer inthe army which held the region against the Indians in the pioneer times;he passed the latter part of his life there, and he died and was buriedin the Boy's Town. My boy had to go by the yard when he went to see hisgrandmother, and even at high noon the sight of the officer's monument, and the other gravestones standing and leaning about, made his fleshcreep and his blood run cold. When there were other boys with him hewould stop at the door of the shed, where a large, fair German wassawing slabs of marble with a long saw that had no teeth, and that heeased every now and then with water from a sponge he kept by him; but ifthe boy was alone, and it was getting at all late in the afternoon, healways ran by the place as fast as he could. He could hardly have toldwhat he was afraid of, but he must have connected the gravestones withghosts. 

[Illustration: "HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD. "]

His superstitions were not all of the ghastly kind; some of them relatedto conduct and character. It was noted long ago how boys throw stones, for instance, at a tree, and feign to themselves that this thing orthat, of great import, will happen or not as they hit or miss the tree. But my boy had other fancies, which came of things he had read and halfunderstood. In one of his school-books was a story that began, "Charleswas an honest boy, but Robert was the name of a thief, " and it went onto show how Charles grew up in the respect and affection of all who knewhim by forbearing to steal some oranges which their owner had set forsafe-keeping at the heels of his horse, while Robert was kicked at once(there was a picture that showed him holding his stomach with bothhands), and afterwards came to a bad end, through attempting to takeone. My boy conceived from the tale that the name of Robert wasnecessarily associated with crime; it was long before he outgrew theprejudice; and this tale and others of a like vindictive virtuousnessimbued him with such a desire to lead an upright life that he was rathera bother to his friends with his scruples. A girl at school mislaid apencil which she thought she had lent him, and he began to have a morbidbelief that he must have stolen it; he became frantic with the meredread of guilt; he could not eat or sleep, and it was not till he wentto make good the loss with a pencil which his grandfather gave him thatthe girl said she had found her pencil in her desk, and saved him fromthe despair of a self-convicted criminal. After that his father tried toteach him the need of using his reason as well as his conscienceconcerning himself, and not to be a little simpleton. But he was alwaysin an anguish to restore things to their owners, like the good boys inthe story-books, and he suffered pangs of the keenest remorse for thepart he once took in the disposition of a piece of treasure-trove. This was a brown-paper parcel which he found behind a leaning gravestonein the stone-cutter's yard, and which he could not help peeping into. Itwas full of raisins, and in the amaze of such a discovery he could nothelp telling the other boys. They flocked round and swooped down uponthe parcel like birds of prey, and left not a raisin behind. In vain heimplored them not to stain their souls with this misdeed; neither thelaw nor the prophets availed; neither the awful shadow of the prisonwhich he cast upon them, nor the fear of the last judgment which heinvoked. They said that the raisins did not belong to anybody; that theowner had forgotten all about them; that they had just been put there bysome one who never intended to come back for them. He went awaysorrowing, without touching a raisin (he felt that the touch must havestricken him with death), and far heavier in soul than the hardenedaccomplices of his sin, of whom he believed himself the worst in havingbetrayed the presence of the raisins to them. 

He used to talk to himself when he was little, but one day his mothersaid to him jokingly, "Don't you know that he who talks to himself hasthe devil for a listener?" and after that he never dared whisper abovehis breath when he was alone, though his father and mother had bothtaught him that there was no devil but his own evil will. He shudderedwhen he heard a dog howling in the night, for that was a sign thatsomebody was going to die. If he heard a hen crow, as a hen sometimesunnaturally would, he stoned her, because it was a sign of the worstkind of luck. He believed that warts came from playing with toads, butyou could send them away by saying certain words over them; and he wassorry that he never had any warts, so that he could send them away, andsee them go; but he never could bear to touch a toad, and so of coursehe could not have warts. Other boys played with toads just to show thatthey were not afraid of having warts; but every one knew that if youkilled a toad, your cow would give bloody milk. I dare say the farforefathers of the race knew this too, when they first began to herdtheir kine in the birthplace of the Aryan peoples; and perhaps theylearned then that if you killed a snake early in the day its tail wouldlive till sundown. My boy killed every snake he could; he thought itsomehow a duty; all the boys thought so; they dimly felt that they weremaking a just return to the serpent-tribe for the bad behavior of theirancestor in the Garden of Eden. Once, in a corn-field near the LittleReservoir, the boys found on a thawing day of early spring knots andbundles of snakes writhen and twisted together, in the torpor of theirlong winter sleep. It was a horrible sight, that afterwards haunted myboy's dreams. He had nightmares which remained as vivid in his thoughtsas anything that happened to him by day. There were no poisonous snakesin the region of the Boy's Town, but there were some large blacksnakes, and the boys said that if a blacksnake got the chance he would run upyour leg, and tie himself round your body so that you could not breathe. Nobody had ever seen a blacksnake do it, and nobody had ever seen ahoop-snake, but the boys believed there was such a snake, and that hewould take his tail in his mouth, when he got after a person, and rollhimself along swifter than the fastest race-horse could run. He did notbite, but when he came up with you he would take the point of his tailout of his mouth and strike it into you. If he struck his tail into atree, the tree would die. My boy had seen a boy who had been chased by ahoop-snake, but he had not seen the snake, though for the matter of thatthe boy who had been chased by it had not seen it either; he did notstop to see it. Another kind of snake that was very strange was ahair-snake. No one had ever seen it happen, but every one knew that ifyou put long horsehairs into a puddle of water and let them stay, theywould turn into hair-snakes; and when you drank out of a spring you hadto be careful not to swallow a hair-snake, or it would remain in yourstomach and grow there. 

When you saw a lizard, you had to keep your mouth tight shut, or elsethe lizard would run down your throat before you knew it. That was whatall the boys said, and my boy believed it, though he had never heard ofanybody that it happened to. He believed that if you gave a chicken-cockburnt brandy it could lay eggs, and that if you gave a boy burnt brandyit would stop his growing. That was the way the circus-men got theirdwarfs, and the India-rubber man kept himself limber by rubbing hisjoints with rattlesnake oil. 

A snake could charm a person, and when you saw a snake you had to killit before it could get its eye on you or it would charm you. Snakesalways charmed birds; and there were mysterious powers of the air andforces of nature that a boy had to be on his guard against, just as abird had to look out for snakes. You must not kill a granddaddy-long-legs, or a lady-bug; it was bad luck. My boy believed, or was afraid hebelieved, that

 "What you dream Monday morning before daylight Will come true before Saturday night, "

but if it was something bad, you could keep it from coming true by nottelling your dream till you had eaten breakfast. He governed his little, foolish, frightened life not only by the maxims he had learned out ofhis "Gesta Romanorum, " but by common sayings of all sorts, such as

 "See a pin and leave it lay You'll have bad luck all the day, "

and if ever he tried to rebel against this slavery, and went by a pin inthe path, his fears tormented him till he came back and picked it up. Hewould not put on his left stocking first, for that was bad luck; butbesides these superstitions, which were common to all the boys, heinvented superstitions of his own, with which he made his life a burden. He did not know why, but he would not step upon the cracks between thepaving-stones, and some days he had to touch every tree or post alongthe sidewalk, as Doctor Johnson did in his time, though the boy hadnever heard of Doctor Johnson then. 

While he was yet a very little fellow, he had the distorted, mistakenpiety of childhood. He had an abject terror of dying, but it seemed tohim that if a person could die right in the centre isle of thechurch--the Methodist church where his mother used to go before shebecame finally a New Churchwoman--the chances of that person's goingstraight to heaven would be so uncommonly good that he need have verylittle anxiety about it. He asked his mother if she did not think sotoo, holding by her hand as they came out of church together, and henoticed the sort of gravity and even pain with which she and his fatherreceived this revelation of his darkling mind. They tried to teach himwhat they thought of such things; but though their doctrine caught hisfancy and flattered his love of singularity, he was not proof againstthe crude superstitions of his mates. He thought for a time that therewas a Bad Man, but this belief gave way when he heard his fatherlaughing about a certain clergyman who believed in a personal devil. 

The boys said the world was going to be burned up some time, and my boyexpected the end with his full share of the trouble that it must bringto every sinner. His fears were heightened by the fact that hisgrandfather believed this end was very near at hand, and was preparedfor the second coming of Christ at any moment. Those were the days whenthe minds of many were stirred by this fear or hope; the believers hadtheir ascension robes ready, and some gave away their earthly goods soas not to be cumbered with anything in their heavenward flight. At home, my boy heard his father jest at the crazy notion, and make fun of thebelievers; but abroad, among the boys, he took the tint of theprevailing gloom. One awful morning at school, it suddenly became sodark that the scholars could not see to study their lessons, and thenthe boys knew that the end of the world was coming. There were noclouds, as for a coming storm, but the air was blackened almost to thedusk of night; the school was dismissed, and my boy went home to findthe candles lighted, and a strange gloom and silence on everythingoutside. He remembered entering into this awful time, but he no moreremembered coming out of it than if the earth had really passed away infire and smoke. 

He early heard of forebodings and presentiments, and he tried hardagainst his will to have them, because he was so afraid of having them. For the same reason he did his best, or his worst, to fall into atrance, in which he should know everything that was going on about him, all the preparations for his funeral, all the sorrow and lamentation, but should be unable to move or speak, and only be saved at the lastmoment by some one putting a mirror to his lips and finding a littleblur of mist on it. Sometimes when he was beginning to try to writethings and to imagine characters, if he imagined a character's dying, then he became afraid he was that character, and was going to die. 

Once, he woke up in the night and found the full moon shining into hisroom in a very strange and phantasmal way, and washing the floor withits pale light, and somehow it came into his mind that he was going todie when he was sixteen years old. He could then only have been nine orten, but the perverse fear sank deep into his soul, and became anincreasing torture till he passed his sixteenth birthday and enteredupon the year in which he had appointed himself to die. The agony wasthen too great for him to bear alone any longer, and with shame heconfessed his doom to his father. "Why, " his father said, "you are inyour seventeenth year now. It is too late for you to die at sixteen, "and all the long-gathering load of misery dropped from the boy's soul, and he lived till his seventeenth birthday and beyond it without furthertrouble. If he had known that he would be in his seventeenth year assoon as he was sixteen, he might have arranged his presentimentdifferently. 

XVIII. 

THE NATURE OF BOYS. 

I TELL these things about my boy, not so much because they were peculiarto him as because I think they are, many of them, common to all boys. One tiresome fact about boys is that they are so much alike; or used tobe. They did not wish to be so, but they could not help it. They did noteven know they were alike; and my boy used to suffer in ways that hebelieved no boy had ever suffered before; but as he grew older he foundthat boys had been suffering in exactly the same way from the beginningof time. In the world you will find a great many grown-up boys, withgray beards and grandchildren, who think that they have been differenttheir whole lives through from other people, and are the victims ofdestiny. That is because with all their growing they have never grown tobe men, but have remained a sort of cry-babies. The first thing you haveto learn here below is that in essentials you are just like every oneelse, and that you are different from others only in what is not so muchworth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures, it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quiteyour own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion ofwhat came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and hadnothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any differencebetween you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming differencethat flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, and makesyou think you are a remarkable fellow. 

There is a difference between boys and men, but it is a difference ofself-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do everything because he does notknow he cannot; a man wants to do something because he knows he cannotdo everything; a boy always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds becausethe man knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boybecause he knows better; he has learned by experience that what is aharm to others is a greater harm to himself, and he would rather not doit. But a boy hardly knows what harm is, and he does it mostly withoutrealizing that it hurts. He cannot invent anything, he can only imitate;and it is easier to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but howare you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure incontriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a wasp'scamp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if you do not, thennothing at all happens. If you set a dog to chase a cat up a tree, thensomething has been done; but if you do not set the dog on the cat, thenthe cat just lies in the sun and sleeps, and you lose your time. If aboy could find out some way of doing good, so that he could be active init, very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he cannot, he very seldom wants to do good. 

Or at least he did not want to do good in my boy's time. Things may bechanged now, for I have been talking of boys as they were in the Boy'sTown forty years ago. For anything that I really know to the contrary, a lot of fellows when they get together now may plot good deeds of allkinds, but when more than a single one of them was together then theyplotted mischief. When I see five or six boys now lying under a tree onthe grass, and they fall silent as I pass them, I have no right to saythat they are not arranging to go and carry some poor widow's winterwood into her shed and pile it neatly up for her, and wish to keep it asecret from everybody; but forty years ago I should have had good reasonfor thinking that they were debating how to tie a piece of herclothes-line along the ground so that when her orphan boy came out foran armload of wood after dark, he would trip on it and send his woodflying all over the yard. 

This would not be a sign that they were morally any worse than the boyswho read _Harper's Young People_, and who would every one die ratherthan do such a cruel thing, but that they had not really thought muchabout it. I dare say that if a crowd of the _Young People_'s readers, from eight to eleven years old, got together, they would choose the bestboy among them to lead them on in works of kindness and usefulness; butI am very sorry to say that in the Boy's Town such a crowd of boys wouldhave followed the lead of the worst boy as far as they dared. Not all ofthem would have been bad, and the worst of them would not have been verybad; but they would have been restless and thoughtless. I am not readyto say that boys now are not wise enough to be good; but in that timeand town they certainly were not. In their ideals and ambitions theywere foolish, and in most of their intentions they were mischievous. Without realizing that it was evil, they meant more evil than it wouldhave been possible for ten times as many boys to commit. If the half ofit were now committed by men, the United States would be such an awfulplace that the decent people would all want to go and live in Canada. 

I have often read in stories of boys who were fond of nature, and lovedher sublimity and beauty, but I do not believe boys are ever naturallyfond of nature. They want to make use of the woods and fields andrivers; and when they become men they find these aspects of natureendeared to them by association, and so they think that they were dearfor their own sakes; but the taste for nature is as purely acquired asthe taste for poetry or the taste for tomatoes. I have often seen boyswondering at the rainbow, but it was wonder, not admiration that movedthem; and I have seen them excited by a storm, but because the storm wastremendous, not because it was beautiful. 

I never knew a boy who loved flowers, or cared for their decorativequalities; if any boy had gathered flowers the other boys would havelaughed at him; though boys gather every kind of thing that they thinkwill be of the slightest use or profit. I do not believe they appreciatethe perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the mostnoisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw acrowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the detailsof his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom withindifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than theloveliest form of leaf or blossom. Their senses have none of thedelicacy which they acquire in after-life. 

They are not cruel, that is, they have no delight in giving pain, as ageneral thing; but they do cruel things out of curiosity, to see howtheir victims will act. Still, even in this way, I never saw many cruelthings done. If another boy gets hurt they laugh, because it is funny tosee him hop or hear him yell; but they do not laugh because they enjoyhis pain, though they do not pity him unless they think he is badlyhurt; then they are scared, and try to comfort him. To bait a hook theytear an angle-worm into small pieces, or impale a grub withoutflinching; they go to the slaughter-house and see beeves knocked in thehead without a tremor. They acquaint themselves, at any risk, with allthat is going on in the great strange world they have come into; andthey do not pick or choose daintily among the facts and objects theyencounter. To them there is neither foul nor fair, clean nor unclean. They have not the least discomfort from being dirty or unkempt, and theycertainly find no pleasure in being washed and combed and clad in freshlinen. They do not like to see other boys so; if a boy looking sleek andsmooth came among the boys that my boy went with in the Boy's Town, theymade it a reproach to him, and hastened to help him spoil his clothesand his nice looks. Some of those boys had hands as hard as horn, cracked open at the knuckles and in the palms, and the crevicesblackened with earth or grime; and they taught my boy to believe that hewas an inferior and unmanly person, almost of the nature of a cry-baby, because his hands were not horn-like, and cracked open, and filled withdirt. 

He had comrades enough and went with everybody, but till he formed thatfriendship with the queer fellow whom I have told of, he had no friendamong the boys; and I very much doubt whether small boys understandfriendship, or can feel it as they do afterwards, in its tenderness andunselfishness. In fact they have no conception of generosity. They arewasteful with what they do not want at the moment; but their instinct isto get and not to give. In the Boy's Town, if a fellow appeared at hisgate with a piece of bread spread with apple-butter and sugar on top, the other fellows flocked round him and tried to flatter him out ofbites of it, though they might be at that moment almost bursting withsurfeit. To get a bite was so much clear gain, and when they hadwheedled one from the owner of the bread, they took as large a bite astheir mouths could stretch to, and they had neither shame nor regret fortheir behavior, but mocked his just resentment. 

The instinct of getting, of hoarding, was the motive of all theirforaging; they had no other idea of property than the bounty of nature;and this was well enough as far as it went, but their impulse was not toshare this bounty with others, but to keep it each for himself. Theyhoarded nuts and acorns, and hips and haws, and then they wasted them;and they hoarded other things merely from the greed of getting, and withno possible expectation of advantage. It might be well enough to catchbees in hollyhocks, and imprison them in underground cells with flowersfor them to make honey from; but why accumulate fire-flies and evendor-bugs in small brick pens? Why heap together mussel-shells; and whatdid a boy expect to do with all the marbles he won? You could trademarbles for tops, but they were not money, like pins; and why were pinsmoney? Why did the boys instinctively choose them for their currency, and pay everything with them? There were certain very rigid laws aboutthem, and a bent pin could not be passed among the boys any more than acounterfeit coin among men. There were fixed prices; three pins wouldbuy a bite of apple; six pins would pay your way into a circus; and soon. But where did these pins come from or go to; and what did the boysexpect to do with them all? No boy knew. From time to time several boysgot together and decided to keep store, and then other boys decided tobuy of them with pins; but there was no calculation in the scheme; andthough I have read of boys, especially in English books, who made aprofit out of their fellows, I never knew any boy who had enoughforecast to do it. They were too wildly improvident for anything of thekind, and if they had any virtue at all it was scorn of the vice ofstinginess. 

They were savages in this as in many other things, but noble savages;and they were savages in such bravery as they showed. That is, they wereventuresome, but not courageous with the steadfast courage of civilizedmen. They fought, and then ran; and they never fought except with somereal or fancied advantage. They were grave, like Indians, for the mostpart; and they were noisy without being gay. They seldom laughed, exceptat the pain or shame of some one; I think they had no other conceptionof a joke, though they told what they thought were funny stories, mostlyabout some Irishman just come across the sea, but without expecting anyone to laugh. In fact, life was a very serious affair with them. Theylived in a state of outlawry, in the midst of invisible terrors, andthey knew no rule but that of might. 

I am afraid that _Harper's Young People_, or rather the mothers of_Harper's Young People_, may think I am painting a very gloomy pictureof the natives of the Boy's Town; but I do not pretend that what I sayof the boys of forty years ago is true of boys nowadays, especially theboys who read _Harper's Young People_. I understand that these boysalways like to go tidily dressed and to keep themselves neat; and that agood many of them carry canes. They would rather go to school than fish, or hunt, or swim, any day; and if one of their teachers were ever tooffer them a holiday, they would reject it by a vote of the wholeschool. They never laugh at a fellow when he hurts himself or tears hisclothes. They are noble and self-sacrificing friends, and they carry outall their undertakings. They often have very exciting adventures such asmy boy and his mates never had; they rescue one another from shipwreckand Indians; and if ever they are caught in a burning building, or castaway on a desolate island, they know just exactly what to do. 

But, I am ashamed to say, it was all very different in the Boy's Town;and I might as well make a clean breast of it while I am about it. Thefellows in that town were every one dreadfully lazy--that is, they neverwanted to do any thing they were set to do; but if they set themselvesto do anything, they would work themselves to death at it. In this aloneI understand that they differed by a whole world's difference from theboys who read _Harper's Young People_. I am almost afraid to confess howlittle moral strength most of those long-ago boys had. A fellow would bevery good at home, really and truly good, and as soon as he got out withthe other fellows he would yield to almost any temptation to mischiefthat offered, and if none offered he would go and hunt one up, and wouldnever stop till he had found one, and kept at it till it overcame him. The spirit of the boy's world is not wicked, but merely savage, as Ihave often said in this book; it is the spirit of not knowing better. That is, the prevailing spirit is so. Here and there a boy does knowbetter, but he is seldom a leader among boys; and usually he is ashamedof knowing better, and rarely tries to do better than the rest. He wouldlike to please his father and mother, but he dreads the other boys andwhat they will say; and so the light of home fades from his ignorantsoul, and leaves him in the outer darkness of the street. It may be thatit must be so; but it seems a great pity; and it seems somehow as if thefather and the mother might keep with him in some word, some thought, and be there to help him against himself, whenever he is weak andwavering. The trouble is that the father and mother are too oftenchildren in their way, and little more fit to be the guide than he. 

But while I am owning to a good deal that seems to me lamentably wrongin the behavior of the Boy's Town boys, I ought to remember one or twothings to their credit. They had an ideal of honor, false enough as faras resenting insult went, but true in some other things. They werealways respectful to women, and if a boy's mother ever appeared amongthem, to interfere in behalf of her boy when they were abusing him, theyfelt the indecorum, but they were careful not to let her feel it. Theywould not have dreamed of uttering a rude or impudent word to her; theyobeyed her, and they were even eager to serve her, if she asked a favorof them. 

For the most part, also, they were truthful, and they only told lieswhen they felt obliged to do so, as when they had been in swimming andsaid they had not, or as when they wanted to get away from some of theboys, or did not wish the whole crowd to know what they were doing. Butthey were generally shamefaced in these lies; and the fellows who couldlie boldly and stick to it were few. In the abstract lying was held insuch contempt that if any boy said you were a liar you must strike him. That was not to be borne for an instant, any more than if he had calledyou a thief. 

I never knew a boy who was even reputed to have stolen anything, amongall the boys, high and low, who met together and played in a perfectsocial equality; and cheating in any game was despised. To break bounds, to invade an orchard or garden, was an adventure which might bepermitted; but even this was uncommon, and most of the boys saw theaffair in the true light, and would not take part in it, though it wasconsidered fair to knock apples off a tree that hung over the fence; andif you were out walnutting you might get over the fence in extremecases, and help yourself. If the owner of the orchard was supposed to bestingy you might do it to plague him. But the standard of honesty waschivalrously high among those boys; and I believe that if ever we havethe equality in this world which so many good men have hoped for, theftwill be unknown. Dishonesty was rare even among men in the Boy's Town, because there was neither wealth nor poverty there, and all had enoughand few too much. 

XIX. 

THE TOWN ITSELF. 

OF course I do not mean to tell what the town was as men knew it, butonly as it appeared to the boys who made use of its opportunities forhaving fun. The civic centre was the court-house, with the countybuildings about it in the court-house yard; and the great thing in thecourt-house was the town clock. It was more important in the boys'esteem than even the wooden woman, who had a sword in one hand and apair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and the boysbelieved that she would be as high as a house if she stood on theground. She was above the clock, which was so far up in the air, againstthe summer sky which was always blue, that it made your neck ache tolook up at it; and the bell was so large that once when my boy was avery little fellow, and was in the belfry with his brother, to see ifthey could get some of the pigeons that nested there, and the clockbegan to strike, it almost smote him dead with the terror of its sound, and he felt his heart quiver with the vibration of the air between thestrokes. It seemed to him that he should never live to get down; and henever knew how he did get down. He could remember being in thecourt-house after that, one night when a wandering professor gave anexhibition in the court-room, and showed the effects of laughing-gas onsuch men and boys as were willing to breathe it. It was the same gasthat dentists now give when they draw teeth; but it was then used tomake people merry and truthful, to make them laugh and say just whatthey thought. My boy was too young to know whether it did either; but hewas exactly the right age, when on another night there was a largepicture of Death on a Pale Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom ofhis soul by its ghastliness. When he was much older, his father urgedhim to go to the court-house and hear the great Corwin, whose MexicanWar speech he had learned so much of by heart, arguing a case; but theboy was too bashful to go in when he got to the door, and came back andreported that he was afraid they would make him swear. He was sometimesin the court-house yard, at elections and celebrations; and once he camefrom school at recess with some other boys and explored the region ofthe jail. Two or three prisoners were at the window, and they talked tothe boys and joked; and the boys ran off again and played; and theprisoners remained like unreal things in my boy's fancy. Perhaps if itwere not for this unreality which misery puts on for the happy when itis out of sight, no one could be happy in a world where there is so muchmisery. 

The school was that first one which he went to, in the basement of achurch. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaningin the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called sobecause the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there toldhim so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and aCatholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubtthere were other churches; but he had nothing to do with them. 

Besides his grandfather's drug and book store, there was another drugstore, and there were eight or ten dry-goods stores, where every springthe boys were taken to be fitted with new straw hats; but the store thatthey knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaintold German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew's-harps. The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbersthrough the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glassthat glistened in the sun. After a while the building disappeared like ascene shifted at the theatre, and it was probably torn down. Then theboys found another toy store; but they considered the dealer mean; heasked very high prices, and he said, when a boy hung back from buying athing that it was "a very superior article, " and the boys had that for aby-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper's boy when they wantedto plague him. There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery therewere small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest cakes in the world, for acent apiece; at the Dutch bakery there were pretzels, with salt andashes sticking on them, that the Dutch boys liked; but the American boysmade fun of them, and the bread at the Dutch bakery was always sour. There were four or five taverns where drink was always sold anddrunkards often to be seen; and there was one Dutch tavern, but theDutchmen generally went to the brewery for their beer, and drank itthere. The boys went to the brewery, to get yeast for their mothers; andthey liked to linger among the great heaps of malt, and the huge vatswreathed in steam, and sending out a pleasant smell. The floors werealways wet, and the fat, pale Dutchmen, working about in the vapory air, never spoke to the boys, who were afraid of them. They took a boy'sbottle and filled it with foaming yeast, and then took his cent, all ina silence so oppressive that he scarcely dared to breathe. My boywondered where they kept the boy they were bringing up to drink beer;but it would have been impossible to ask. The brewery overlooked theriver, and you could see the south side of the bridge from its backwindows, and that was very strange. It was just like the picture of thebridge in "Howe's History of Ohio, " and that made it seem like a bridgein some far-off country. 

There were two fire-engines in the Boy's Town; but there seemed to besomething always the matter with them, so that they would not work, ifthere was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulledthem up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with themagainst the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as goodas a muster to see the firemen in their red shirts and black trousers, dragging the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each side ofthe rope. My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he neverdared; and the foreman of the Neptune, which was the larger and feeblerof the engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyesthat he felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was astorekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his blacktrousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and abrass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It didnot make any difference how close he was to the men, he shoutedeverything through the trumpet; and when they manned the breaks andbegan to pump, he roared at them, "Down on her, down on her, boys!" sothat you would have thought the Neptune could put out the world if itwas burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter fromthe nozzle, and sometimes none at all, even if the hose did not break;it was fun to see the hose break. The Neptune was a favorite with theboys, though they believed that the Tremont could squirt farther, andthey had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by itsreticence in public. It was small and black, but the Neptune was large, and painted of a gay color lit up with gilding that sent the bloodleaping through a boy's veins. The boys knew the Neptune was out oforder, but they were always expecting it would come right, and in themeantime they felt that it was an honor to the town, and they followedit as proudly back to the engine-house after one of its magnificentfailures as if it had been a magnificent success. The boys were alwaysmaking magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for theNeptune. 

[Illustration: "THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF. "]

Before the Hydraulic was opened, the pork-houses were the chief publicattraction to the boys, and they haunted them, with a thrilling interestin the mysteries of pork-packing which none of their sensibilitiesrevolted from. Afterwards, the cotton-mills, which were rather smallbrick factories, though they looked so large to the boys, eclipsed thepork-house in their regard. They were all wild to work in the mills atfirst, and they thought it a hardship that their fathers would not letthem leave school and do it. Some few of the fellows that my boy knewdid get to work in the mills; and one of them got part of his fingertaken off in the machinery; it was thought a distinction among theboys, and something like having been in war. My boy's brother was socrazy to try mill-life that he was allowed to do so for a few weeks; buta few weeks were enough of it, and pretty soon the feeling about themills all quieted down, and the boys contented themselves with theirflumes and their wheel-pits, and the head-gates that let the water in onthe wheels; sometimes you could find fish under the wheels when themills were not running. The mill-doors all had "No Admittance" paintedon them; and the mere sight of the forbidding words would have beenenough to keep my boy away, for he had a great awe of any sort ofauthority; but once he went into the mill to see his brother; andanother time he and some other boys got into an empty mill, where theyfound a painter on an upper floor painting a panorama of "ParadiseLost. " This masterpiece must have been several hundred feet long; theboys disputed whether it would reach to the sawmill they could see fromthe windows if it was stretched out; and my boy was surprised by theeffects which the painter got out of some strips of tinsel which he wasattaching to the scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone at differentpoints. The artist seemed satisfied himself with this simple means ofsuggesting the gleam of infernal fires. He walked off to a distance toget it in perspective, and the boys ventured so close to the paintswhich he had standing about by the bucketful that it seemed as if hemust surely hollo at them. But he did not say anything or seem toremember that they were there. They formed such a favorable opinion ofhim and his art that they decided to have a panorama; but it never cameto anything. In the first place they could not get the paints, letalone the muslin. 

Besides the bridge, the school-houses, the court-house and jail, theport-houses and the mills, there was only one other public edifice intheir town that concerned the boys, or that they could use inaccomplishing the objects of their life, and this was the hall that wasbuilt while my boy could remember its rise, for public amusements. Itwas in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays, for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed tobe devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled inthat science, which has reappeared in these days under the name ofhypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besidesteaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gavenightly displays of its wonders. He mesmerized numbers of the boys, andmade them do or think whatever he said. He would give a boy a cane, andthen tell him it was a snake, and the boy would throw it away likelightning. He would get a lot of boys, and mount them on chairs, andthen tell them that they were at a horse-race, and the boys would gallopastride of their chairs round and round till he stopped them. Sometimeshe would scare them almost to death, with a thunder-storm that he saidwas coming on; at other times he would make them go in swimming, on thedusty floor, and they would swim all over it in their best clothes, andwould think they were in the river. 

There were some people who did not believe in the professor, or the boyseither. One of these people was an officer of the army who was staying awhile in the Boy's Town, and perhaps had something to do withrecruiting troops for the Mexican War. He came to the lecture onenight, and remained with others who lingered after it was over to speakwith the professor. My boy was there with his father, and it seemed tohim that the officer smiled mockingly at the professor; angry wordspassed, and then the officer struck out at the professor. In an instantthe professor put up both his fists; they flashed towards the officer'sforehead, and the officer tumbled backwards. The boy could hardlybelieve it had happened. It seemed unreal, and of the dreamlike qualitythat so many facts in a child's bewildered life are of. 

There were very few places of amusement or entertainment in the Boy'sTown that were within a boy's reach. There were at least a dozen placeswhere a man could get whiskey, but only one where he could getice-cream, and the boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit thisresort. But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the outskirts of thetown, which my boy remembered visiting when he was a very little fellow, with his brother. There were two large old mulberry-trees in thisgarden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries, and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all themulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a tame crow that my boyunderstood could talk if it liked; but it only ran after him, and triedto bite his legs. Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, orpuzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out amongbushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could findyour way out. My boy, though he had hold of his brother's hand, did notexpect to get out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he hadsome notion that his end would be hastened by the tame crow. His firstvisit to the pleasure-garden was his last; and it passed so wholly outof his consciousness that he never knew what became of it any more thanif it had been taken up into the clouds. 

He tasted ice-cream there for the first time, and had his doubts aboutit, though a sherry-glass full of it cost a fip, and it ought to havebeen good for such a sum as that. Later in life, he sometimes went tothe saloon where it was sold in the town, and bashfully gasped out ademand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. Butthe boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not missthem much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arisingfrom the woods and waters all about them that they did not need publicamusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. Ihave tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the dailyarrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust ifI failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of theold-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy's Town and Cincinnati. Idare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it lookedas large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; andthey assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civicpride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart. 

My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the stage when he was soyoung that it must have been when he first came to the Boy's Town. Thedistance was twenty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It wasthis furious speed which gave the child his earliest illusion of treesand fences racing by while the stage seemed to stand still. Severaltimes after that he made the journey with his father, seeming to havebeen gone a long age before he got back, and always so homesick that henever had any appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinnermidway. When it started back, he thought it would never get off the citypave and out from between its lines of houses into the free country. Theboys always called Cincinnati "The City. " They supposed it was the onlycity in the world. 

[Illustration: "MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE. "]

Of course there was a whole state of things in the Boy's Town that theboys never knew of, or only knew by mistaken rumors and distortedglimpses. They had little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religionthat was not wrong, and they only concerned themselves with persons andplaces so far as they expected to make use of them. But as they couldmake very little use of grown persons or public places, they kept awayfrom them, and the Boy's Town was, for the most part, an affair ofwater-courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the houses, and the alleys behind them. 

Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some of them hadflower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than hehas ever seen since in Europe or America. Very likely they were not sovast or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of them at leasthad beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and borders of flags and pinks, withclumps of tiger-lilies and hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside itthere were high bushes full of snow-balls, and rose-trees withmoss-roses on them. In this superb domain there were two summer-housesand a shed where bee-hives stood; at the end of the garden was abath-house, and you could have a shower-bath, if you were of a mindto bring the water for it from the pump in the barn-yard. But this wasall on a scale of unequalled magnificence; and most of the houses, whichwere mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum-trees andcherry-trees in it; and a vegetable garden at one side that the boyhated to weed. My boy's grandfather had a large and beautiful garden, with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old gentleman trimmed andcared for himself. They were delicious grapes; and there were blackcurrants, which the grandfather liked, because he had liked them when hewas a boy himself in the old country, but which no Boy's Town boy couldhave been induced to take as a gracious gift. Another boy had a fatherthat had a green-house; he was a boy that would let you pull pie-plantin the garden, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in thegreen-house. His cleverness was rewarded when his father was electedgovernor of the state; and what made it so splendid was that his fatherwas a Whig. 

Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, had a woodshed, which was the place where a boy mostly received his friends, and madehis kites and wagons, and laid his plots and plans for all the failuresof his life. The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went in toask his mother whether he might do this or that, or go somewhere. A boyalways wanted to have a stove in the woodshed and fit it up for himself, but his mother would not let him, because he would have been certain toset the house on fire. 

Each fellow knew the inside of his own house tolerably well, but seldomthe inside of another fellow's house, and he knew the back-yard betterthan the front-yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it wasto wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the garret with himby the kitchen-stairs. If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance, found himself in the living-rooms, or the parlor, he was very unhappy, and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were not of an oppressivegrandeur, and one was much like another. The parlor had what was calleda flowered-carpet or gay pattern of ingrain on its floor, and the otherrooms had rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for the work, and dyed at home with such native tints as butternut and foreign colorsas logwood. The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood wasburned, and coal was never seen. They were lit at night withtallow-candles, which were mostly made by the housewife herself, or bylard-oil glass lamps. In the winter the oil would get so stiff with thecold that it had to be thawed out at the fire before the lamp wouldburn. There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; and the fireon the hearth was kept over from day to day all winter long, by coveringa log at night with ashes; in the morning it would be a bed of coals. There were no fires in bedrooms, or at least not in a boy's bedroom, andsometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher before he could wash;it did not take him very long to dress. 

I have said that they burned wood for heating in the Boy's Town; but myboy could remember one winter when they burned ears of corn in theprinting-office stove because it was cheaper. I believe they stillsometimes burn corn in the West, when they are too far from a market tosell it at a paying price; but it always seems a sin and a shame that ina state pretending to be civilized food should ever be destroyed whenso many are hungry. When one hears of such things one would almost thinkthat boys could make a better state than this of the men. 

XX. 

TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 

IN the Boy's Town a great many men gave nearly their whole time to theaffairs of the state, and did hardly anything but talk politics all day;they even sat up late at night to do it. Among these politicians theWhigs were sacred in my boy's eyes, but the Democrats appeared likeenemies of the human race; and one of the strangest things that everhappened to him was to find his father associating with men who came outof the Democratic party at the time he left the Whig party, and joiningwith them in a common cause against both. But when he understood what agood cause it was, and came to sing songs against slavery, he wasreconciled, though he still regarded the Whig politicians as chief amongthe great ones, if not the good ones, of the earth. When he passed oneof them on the street, he held his breath for awe till he got by, whichwas not always so very soon, for sometimes a Whig statesman wanted thewhole sidewalk to himself, and it was hard to get by him. There wereother people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these werethe professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, ifnot corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four ofthem, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deepinterest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. I do notthink any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavishlives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, andplagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them. That was because the boys had not the experience to enable them to thinkrightly, or to think at all about such things, or to know what images ofperdition they had before their eyes; and when they followed them andteased them, they did not know they were joining like fiends in thetorment of lost souls. Some of the town-drunkards were the outcasts ofgood homes, which they had desolated, and some had merely destroyed inthemselves that hope of any home which is the light of heaven in everyhuman heart; but from time to time a good man held out a helping hand toone of them, and gave him the shelter of his roof, and tried to reclaimhim. Then the boys saw him going about the streets, pale and tremulous, in a second-hand suit of his benefactor's clothes, and fighting hardagainst the tempter that beset him on every side in that town; and thensome day they saw him dead drunk in a fence corner; and they did notunderstand how seven devils worse than the first had entered in theplace which had been swept and garnished for them. 

Besides the town-drunkards there were other persons in whom the boyswere interested, like the two or three dandies, whom their splendor indress had given a public importance in a community of carelessly dressedmen. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of goodfamilies, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believedto be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale, the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family. Between these and the white people, among whom the boys knew of nodistinctions, they were aware that there was an impassable gulf; and itwould not be easy to give a notion of just the sort of consideration inwhich they held them. But they held the Dumb Negro himself in almostsuperstitious regard as one who, though a deaf-mute, knew everythingthat was going on, and could make you understand anything he wished. Hewas, in fact, a master of most eloquent pantomime; he had gestures thatcould not be mistaken, and he had a graphic dumb-show for persons andoccupations and experiences that was delightfully vivid. For a dentist, he gave an upward twist of the hand from his jaw, and uttered a howlwhich left no doubt that he meant tooth-pulling; and for what wouldhappen to a boy if he kept on misbehaving, he crossed his fingers beforehis face and looked through them in a way that brought the jail-windowclearly before the eyes of the offender. 

The boys knew vaguely that his family helped runaway slaves on their wayNorth, and in a community that was for the most part bitterlypro-slavery these negroes were held in a sort of respect for theircourageous fidelity to their race. The men were swarthy, handsomefellows, not much darker than Spaniards, and they were so little afraidof the chances which were often such fatal mischances to colored peoplein that day that one of them travelled through the South, and passedhimself in very good company as a Cherokee Indian of rank and education. 

As far as the boys knew, the civic affairs of the place were transactedentirely by two constables. Of mayors and magistrates, such as theremust have been, they knew nothing, and they had not the least notionwhat the Whigs whom they were always trying to elect were to do whenthey got into office. They knew that the constables were both Democrats, but, if they thought at all about the fact, they thought their Democracythe natural outcome of their dark constabulary nature, and by no meansimagined that they were constables because they were Democrats. Theworse of the two, or the more merciless, was also the town-crier, whoseoffice is now not anywhere known in America, I believe; though I heard atown-crier in a Swiss village not many years ago. In the Boy's Town thecrier carried a good-sized bell; when he started out he rang it till hereached the street corner, and then he stopped, and began some suchproclamation as, "O, yes! O, yes! O, yes! There will be an auction thisevening at early candle-light, at Brown & Robinson's store! Dry goods, boots and shoes, hats and caps, hardware, queen's ware, and so forth, and so forth. Richard Roe, Auctioneer! Come one, come all, comeeverybody!" Then the crier rang his bell, and went on to the nextcorner, where he repeated his proclamation. After a while, the constablegot a deputy to whom he made over his business of town-crier. Thisdeputy was no other than that reckless boy who used to run out from theprinting-office and shoot the turtle-doves; and he decorated hisproclamation with quips and quirks of his own invention, and withpersonal allusions to his employer, who was auctioneer as well asconstable. But though he was hail-fellow with every boy in town, andalthough every boy rejoiced in his impudence, he was so panoplied in theawfulness of his relation to the constabulary functions that, howeverremote it was, no boy would have thought of trifling with him when hewas on duty. If ever a boy holloed something at him when he was out withhis crier's bell, he turned and ran as hard as he could, and as if fromthe constable himself. 

The boys knew just one other official, and that was the gauger, whomthey watched at a respectful distance, when they found him employed withhis mysterious instruments gauging the whiskey in the long rows ofbarrels on the Basin bank. They did not know what the process was, and Iown that I do not know to this day what it was. My boy watched him withthe rest, and once he ventured upon a bold and reckless act. He had solong heard that it was whiskey which made people drunk that at last thenotion came to have an irresistible fascination for him, and hedetermined to risk everything, even life itself, to know what whiskeywas like. As soon as the gauger had left them, he ran up to one of thebarrels where he had seen a few drops fall from his instrument when helifted it from the bunghole, and plunged the tip of his little fingerinto the whiskey, and then put it to his tongue. He expected to becomedrunk instantly, if not to end a town-drunkard there on the spot; butthe whiskey only tasted very disgusting; and he was able to get homewithout help. Still, I would not advise any other boy to run the risk hetook in this desperate experiment. 

There was a time not long after that when he really did get drunk, butit was not with whiskey. One morning after a rain, when the boys werehaving fun in one of those open canal-boats with the loose planks whichthe over-night shower had set afloat, a fellow came up and said he hadgot some tobacco that was the best kind to learn to chew with. Every boywho expected to be anything in the world expected to chew tobacco; forall the packet-drivers chewed; and it seemed to my boy that his fatherand grandfather and uncles were about the only people who did not chew. If they had only smoked, it would have been something, but they did noteven smoke; and the boy felt that he had a long arrears of manliness tobring up, and that he should have to retrieve his family in spite ofitself from the shame of not using tobacco in any form. He knew that hisfather abhorred it, but he had never been explicitly forbidden to smokeor chew, for his father seldom forbade him anything explicitly, and hegave himself such freedom of choice in the matter that when the boy withthe tobacco began to offer it around, he judged it right to take a chewwith the rest. The boy said it was a peculiar kind of tobacco, and wasknown as molasses-tobacco because it was so sweet. The other boys didnot ask how he came to know its name, or where he got it; boys never askanything that it would be well for them to know; but they accepted histheory, and his further statement that it was of a mildness singularlyadapted to learners, without misgiving. The boy was himself chewingvigorously on a large quid, and launching the juice from his lips rightand left like a grown person; and my boy took as large a bite as hisbenefactor bade him. He found it as sweet as he had been told it was, and he acknowledged the aptness of its name of molasses-tobacco; itseemed to him a golden opportunity to acquire a noble habit on easyterms. He let the quid rest in his cheek as he had seen men do, when hewas not crushing it between his teeth, and for some moments he poled hisplank up and down the canal-boat with a sense of triumph that nothingmarred. Then, all of a sudden, he began to feel pale. The boat seemedto be going round, and the sky wheeling overhead; the sun was dodgingabout very strangely. Drops of sweat burst from the boy's forehead; helet fall his pole, and said that he thought he would go home. The fellowwho gave him the tobacco began to laugh, and the other fellows to mock, but my boy did not mind them. Somehow, he did not know how, he got outof the canal-boat and started homeward; but at every step the groundrose as high as his knees before him, and then when he got his foot highenough, and began to put it down, the ground was not there. He wasdeathly sick, as he reeled and staggered on, and when he reached home, and showed himself white and haggard to his frightened mother, he hadscarcely strength to gasp out a confession of his attempt to retrievethe family honor by learning to chew tobacco. In another moment naturecame to his relief, and then he fell into a deep sleep which lasted thewhole afternoon, so that it seemed to him the next day when he woke up, glad to find himself alive, if not so very lively. Perhaps he hadswallowed some of the poisonous juice of the tobacco; perhaps it hadacted upon his brain without that. His father made no very close inquiryinto the facts, and he did not forbid him the use of tobacco. It was notnecessary; in that one little experiment he had got enough for a wholelifetime. It shows that, after all, a boy is not so hard to satisfy ineverything. 

There were some people who believed that tobacco would keep off thefever-and-ague, which was so common then in that country, or at any ratethat it was good for the toothache. In spite of the tobacco, there werefew houses where ague was not a familiar guest, however unwelcome. Ifthe family was large, there was usually a chill every day; one had itone day, and another the next, so that there was no lapse. This was thecase in my boy's family, after they moved to the Faulkner house, whichwas near the Basin and its water-soaked banks; but they accepted theague as something quite in the course of nature, and duly broke it upwith quinine. Some of the boys had chills at school; and sometimes, after they had been in swimming, they would wait round on the bank tilla fellow had his chill out, and then they would all go off together andforget about it. The next day that fellow would be as well as any one;the third day his chill would come on again, but he did not allow it tointerfere with his business or pleasure, and after a while the aguewould seem to get tired of it, and give up altogether. That strangeearth-spirit who was my boy's friend simply beat the ague, as it were, on its own ground. He preferred a sunny spot to have his chill in, acosy fence-corner or a warm back door-step, or the like; but as for thefever that followed the chill, he took no account of it whatever, or atleast made no provision for it. 

The miasm which must have filled the air of the place from so manynatural and artificial bodies of fresh water showed itself in lowfevers, which were not so common as ague, but common enough. The onlylong sickness that my boy could remember was intermittent fever, whichseemed to last many weeks, and which was a kind of bewilderment ratherthan a torment. When it was beginning he appeared to glide down thestairs at school without touching the steps with his feet, andafterwards his chief trouble was in not knowing, when he slept, whetherhe had really been asleep or not. But there was rich compensation forthis mild suffering in the affectionate petting which a sick boy alwaysgets from his mother when his malady takes him from his rough littleworld and gives him back helpless to her tender arms again. Then shemakes everything in the house yield to him; none of the others areallowed to tease him or cross him in the slightest thing. They have towalk lightly; and when he is going to sleep, if they come into the room, they have got to speak in a whisper. She sits by his bed and fans him;she smooths the pillow and turns its cool side up under his hot andaching head; she cooks dainty dishes to tempt his sick appetite, andbrings them to him herself. She is so good and kind and loving that hecannot help having some sense of it all, and feeling how much better sheis than anything on earth. His little ruffian world drifts far away fromhim. He hears the yells and shouts of the boys in the street without apang of envy or longing; in his weakness, his helplessness, he becomes agentle and innocent child again; and heaven descends to him out of hismother's heart. 

XXI. 

LAST DAYS. 

I HAVE already told that my boy's father would not support GeneralTaylor, the Whig candidate for President, because he believed him, asthe hero of a pro-slavery war, to be a friend of slavery. At this timehe had a large family of little children, and he had got nothing beyonda comfortable living from the newspaper which he had published for eightyears; if he must give that up, he must begin life anew heavilyburdened. Perhaps he thought it need not come to his giving up hispaper, that somehow affairs might change. But his newspaper would havegone to nothing in his hands if he had tried to publish it as a FreeSoil paper after the election of the Whig candidate; so he sold it, andbegan to cast about for some other business; how anxiously, my boy wastoo young to know. He only felt the relief that the whole family feltfor a while at getting out of the printing business; the boys wanted togo into almost anything else: the drug-business, or farming, or apaper-mill, or anything. The elder brother knew all the anxiety of thetime, and shared it fully with the mother, whose acquiescence in whatthe father thought right was more than patient; she abode courageouslyin the suspense, the uncertainty of the time; and she hoped forsomething from the father's endeavors in the different ways he turned. At one time there was much talk in the family of using the fibre of acommon weed in making paper, which he thought he could introduce;perhaps it was the milk-weed; but he could not manage it, somehow; andafter a year of inaction he decided to go into another newspaper. Bythis time the boys had made their peace with the printing business, andthe father had made his with the Whig party. He had done what it musthave been harder to do than to stand out against it; he had publiclyowned that he was mistaken in regard to Taylor, who had not become thetool of the slaveholders, but had obeyed the highest instincts of theparty and served the interests of freedom, though he was himself aslaveholder and the hero of an unjust war. 

It was then too late, however, for the father to have got back his oldnewspaper, even if he had wished, and the children heard, with theelation that novelty brings to all children, old or young, that theywere going away from the Boy's Town, to live in another place. It was amuch larger place and was even considered a city, though it was notcomparable to Cincinnati, so long the only known city in the world. 

My boy was twelve years old by that time, and was already a swiftcompositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chairto reach the case in setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. Butwhat he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he gotthe name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to comeabout the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. Hisfirst attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointingnature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth orseventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as wellas his school, his university. He could no more remember learning toset type than he could remember learning to read; and in after-life hecould not come within smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humidpaper, of a printing-office without that tender swelling of the heartwhich so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, hisboyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now lookedforward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly toliving in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it wasdecided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave him distinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow. Butwhen it came at last, and he was to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathly homesick. The parting days were days of gloom;the parting was an anguish of bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but thefact that they were going all the way to the new place in a canal-boat, which his father chartered for the trip. My boy and his brother had oncegone to Cincinnati in a canal-boat, with a friendly captain of theiracquaintance, and, though they were both put to sleep in a berth sonarrow that when they turned they fell out on the floor, the glory ofthe adventure remained with him, and he could have thought of nothingmore delightful than such another voyage. The household goods were piledup in the middle of the boat, and the family had a cabin forward, whichseemed immense to the children. They played in it and ran races up anddown the long canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimesput their chairs and sat to admire the scenery. 

As my boy could remember very few incidents of this voyage afterwards, Idare say he spent a great part of it with his face in a book, and wasaware of the landscape only from time to time when he lifted his eyesfrom the story he was reading. That was apt to be the way with him; andbefore he left the Boy's Town the world within claimed him more andmore. He ceased to be that eager comrade he had once been; sometimes heleft his book with a sigh; and he saw much of the outer world through aveil of fancies quivering like an autumn haze between him and itsrealities, softening their harsh outlines, and giving them a fairycoloring. I think he would sometimes have been better employed inlooking directly at them; but he had to live his own life, and I cannotlive it over for him. The season was the one of all others best fittedto win him to the earth, and in a measure it did. It was spring, andalong the tow-path strutted the large, glossy blackbirds which had justcome back, and made the boys sick with longing to kill them, theyoffered such good shots. But the boys had no powder with them, and atany rate the captain would not have stopped his boat, which was rushingon at the rate of two miles an hour, to let them pick up a bird, if theyhad hit it. They were sufficiently provisioned without the game, however; the mother had baked bread, and boiled a ham, and providedsugar-cakes in recognition of the holiday character of the voyage, andthey had the use of the boat cooking-stove for their tea and coffee. Theboys had to content themselves with such sense of adventure as theycould get out of going ashore when the boat was passing through thelocks, or staying aboard and seeing the water burst and plunge in aroundthe boat. They had often watched this thrilling sight at the FirstLock, but it had a novel interest now. As their boat approached thelock, the lower gates were pushed open by men who set their breasts tothe long sweeps or handles of the gates, and when the boat was fairlyinside of the stone-walled lock they were closed behind her. Then theupper gates, which opened against the dull current, and were kept shutby its pressure, were opened a little, and the waters rushed and roaredinto the lock, and began to lift the boat. The gates were opened widerand wider, till the waters poured a heavy cataract into the lock, wherethe boat tossed on their increasing volume, and at last calmedthemselves to the level within. Then the boat passed out through theupper gates, on even water, and the voyage to the next lock began. Atfirst it was rather awful, and the little children were always afraidwhen they came to a lock, but the boys enjoyed it after the first time. They would have liked to take turns driving the pair of horses that drewthe boat, but it seemed too bold a wish, and I think they never proposedit; they did not ask, either, to relieve the man at the helm. 

They arrived safely at their journey's end, without any sort ofaccident. They had made the whole forty miles in less than two days, andwere all as well as when they started, without having suffered for amoment from seasickness. The boat drew up at the tow-path just beforethe stable belonging to the house which the father had already taken, and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the thingsashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keepthe pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instantthat it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted withenough boys to have one. 

The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meetingthe boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for hisstanding among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did notrealize at first how much he missed the Boy's Town and all the familiarfellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then hebegan to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a dividedlove. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, andwherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, atthe end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-longmates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom ofevery pleasure and excitement. There were many excitements, not theleast of which was the excitement of helping get out a tri-weekly andthen a daily newspaper, instead of the weekly that his father hadpublished in the Boy's Town. Then that dear friend of his brother andhimself, the apprentice who knew all about "Monte Cristo, " came to workwith them and live with them again, and that was a great deal; but hedid not bring the Boy's Town with him; and when they each began to writea new historical romance, the thought of the beloved scenes amidst whichthey had planned their first was a pang that nothing could assuage. During the summer the cholera came; the milkman, though naturally acheerful person, said that the people around where he lived were dyingoff like flies; and the funerals, three and four, five and six, ten andtwelve a day, passed before the door; and all the brooding horror of thepestilence sank deep into the boy's morbid soul. Then he fell sick ofthe cholera himself; and, though it was a mild attack, he lay in theValley of the Shadow of Death while it lasted, and waited the worst withsuch terror that when he kept asking her if he should get well, hismother tried to reason with him, and to coax him out of his fear. Was heafraid to die, she asked him, when he knew that heaven was so muchbetter, and he would be in the care of such love as never could come tohim on earth? He could only gasp back that he _was_ afraid to die; andshe could only turn from reconciling him with the other world toassuring him that he was in no danger of leaving this. 

I sometimes think that if parents would deal rightly and truly withchildren about death from the beginning, some of the fear of it might betaken away. It seems to me that it is partly because death is hushed upand ignored between them that it rests such a burden on the soul; but ifchildren were told as soon as they are old enough that death is a partof nature, and not a calamitous accident, they would be somewhatstrengthened to meet it. My boy had been taught that this world was onlyan illusion, a shadow thrown from the real world beyond; and no doubthis father and mother believed what they taught him; but he had alwaysseen them anxious to keep the illusion, and in his turn he clung to thevain shadow with all the force of his being. 

He got well of the cholera, but not of the homesickness, and after awhile he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. It could only have beenthree or four months after he had left it, but it already seemed a verylong time; and he figured himself returning as stage-heroes do to thescenes of their childhood, after an absence of some fifteen years. Hefancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they would find himsomehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the lightaccumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with hisgrandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very fond ofher, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house. He musthave gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no record of thefact, and afterwards he knew only of having arrived, and of searchingabout in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have been atschool; at any rate he found very few of them; and with them he wascertainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with akind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once inthe old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but hefelt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt inthe boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why; onlyit ached. When he went up from his grandmother's to look at the Faulknerhouse, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not bear thesight of it. There were other people living in it; strange voicessounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the windows. 

He came back to his grandmother's, bruised and defeated, and spent themorning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted upthat queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his onlyfriend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkemptas ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never beenshaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy's hand; andthey stood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had onhis best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy's Town boys withthe full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid, but his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and hevanished out of his consciousness like an apparition. 

After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but noneof them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had intheir lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered amongthem, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once, nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not becalled back, something lost that could not be found. 

At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; theuncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavyhomesickness weighed down the child's heart, which now turned from theBoy's Town as longingly as it had turned towards it before. 

They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table. There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and thegrandfather prayed for grace and help amidst the pestilence that walkethin darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt therewould be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. Allthrough the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to saythat he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother andaunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him, out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But hisgrandfather's tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child'smute misery; he said he must go home if he wished. 

In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at thehighest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy's Town was out ofsight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and he came andspent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one ofthe canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. Hefound him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tellhim funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. Therudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsywooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single nightthe distance which the boy's family had been nearly two days intravelling when they moved away from the Boy's Town. 

He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, andwholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented himbefore he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his newenvironment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to saythat he ceased to love the Boy's Town; that he could not do and neverdid. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from himforever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, butcherished its memories the more fondly for that reason. 

There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope wouldeasily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he hadbeen wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a littlesinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are somegreat fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that theyare the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys, but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fullyrounded out with all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is gladthat his lines were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes heknows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in himthen; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because hishome in it was happy. The town was small and the boys there were hemmedin by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was largewith vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenelybright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love. 

THE END. 

 * * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired. 

Page 101, "unbotton" changed to "unbutton" (begins to unbutton)

Page 190, "laugher" changed to "laughter" (great a laughter)