[Illustration]

[Illustration: KITE-TIME]

BOY LIFE

STORIES AND READINGS SELECTED FROM THE WORKS OF

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

AND ARRANGED FOR SUPPLEMENTARYREADING IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS BY

PERCIVAL CHUBB

DIRECTOR OF ENGLISH IN THEETHICAL CULTURE SCHOOL, NEW YORK

ILLUSTRATED

[Illustration]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

 NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMIX

HARPER'S MODERN SERIES

OF SUPPLEMENTARY READERS FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

_Each, Illustrated, 16mo, 50 Cents School. _

BOY LIFE

Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, and Arranged by PERCIVAL CHUBB, Director of English in the EthicalCulture School, New York. 

 "The literary culture which we are trying to give our boys and girls is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not sufficiently national and American. .. . 

 "Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more distinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells. .. . The juvenile books of Mr. Howells' contain some of the very best pages ever written for the enjoyment of young people. "--PERCIVAL CHUBB. 

(_Others in Preparation. _)

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

Copyright, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 

_All rights reserved. _

Published September, 1909. 

CONTENTS

 PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

I. ADVENTURES IN A BOY'S TOWN

 HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS 3

 THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN 13

 JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE 23

II. LIFE IN A BOY'S TOWN

 THE TOWN 41

 EARLIEST MEMORIES 45

 HOME LIFE 47

 THE RIVER 51

 SWIMMING 55

 SKATING 61

 MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 64

 GIRLS 68

 MOTHERS 69

 A BROTHER 73

 A FRIEND 79

III. GAMES AND PASTIMES

 MARBLES 89

 RACES 91

 A MEAN TRICK 93

 TOPS 96

 KITES 98

 THE BUTLER GUARDS 103

 PETS 108

 INDIANS 124

 GUNS 129

 NUTTING 138

 THE FIRE-ENGINES 145

IV. GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

 THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS 151

 PASSING SHOWS 163

 THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN 168

 THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS 171

V. THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN 183

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

KITE-TIME _Frontispiece_

HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THEVERY NEXT MORNING 5

THE FIRST LOCK 43

THE BUTLER GUARDS 105

ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE 127

NUTTING 141

INTRODUCTION

There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we aretrying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondaryschools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is notsufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality andactuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so littleof it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated tooexclusively in the child's mind with things dead and gone--with thePuritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparativelyrecent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk ofthe days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and theAncient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studiesdo not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which--ifhe reads at all--he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, thesketch, and the popular essay of the magazines and newspapers; the newnovel, or the plays which he may see at the theatre. He has not beeninterested in the writers of his own time, and has never been put in theway of the best contemporary fiction. Hence the ineffectualness andwastefulness of much of our school work: it does not lead forward intothe life of to-day, nor help the young to judge intelligently of thepopular books which later on will compete for their favor. 

To be sure, not a little of the material used in our elementary schoolsis drawn from Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, from Irving andHawthorne; but because it is often studied in a so-called thorough and, therefore, very deadly way--slowly and laboriously for drill, ratherthan briskly for pleasure--there is comparatively little of it read, andalmost no sense gained of its being part of a national literature. Inthe high school, owing to the unfortunate domination of the collegeentrance requirements, the situation is not much better. Our studentsleave with a scant and hurried glimpse--if any glimpse at all--ofEmerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, or of Lowell, Lanier, and Poe; with nointimate view of Hawthorne, our great classic; none at all of Parkmanand Fiske, our historians; or of writers like Howells, James, and Cable, or Wilkins, Jewett, and Deland, and a worthy company of story-tellers. 

We may well be on our guard against a vaunting nationalism. It retardsour culture. There should be no confusion of the second-rate values ofmost of our American products with the supreme values of the greatestBritish classics. We may work, of course, toward an ultimateappreciation of these greatest things. We fail, however, in securingsuch appreciation because we have failed to enlist those forms ofinterest which vitalize and stimulate literary studies--above all, thepatriotic or national interest. Concord and Cambridge should be dearer, as they are nearer, to the young American than even Stratford andAbbotsford; Hawthorne should be as familiar as Goldsmith; and Emerson, as Addison or Burke. Ordinarily it is not so; and we suffer theconsequences in the failure of our youth to grasp the spiritual idealsand the distinctively American democratic spirit which find expressionin the greatest work of our literary masters, Emerson and Whitman, Lowell and Lanier. Our culture and our nationalism both suffer thereby. Our literature suffers also, because we have not an instructed andinterested public to encourage excellence. 

Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a moredistinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells; and itis to make his delightful writings more widely known and more easilyaccessible that this volume of selections from his books for the younghas been prepared as a reading-book for the elementary school. Thesejuvenile books of Mr. Howells contain some of the very best pages everwritten for the enjoyment of young people. His two books for boys--_ABoy's Town_ and _The Flight of Pony Baker_--rank with such favorites as_Tom Sawyer_ and _The Story of a Bad Boy_. 

These should be introductory to the best of Mr. Howells' novels andessays in the high school; for Mr. Howells, it need scarcely be said, isone of our few masters of style: his style is as individual anddistinguished as it is felicitous and delicate. More important still, from the educational point of view, he is one of our most modernwriters: the spiritual issues and social problems of our age, which ourolder high-school pupils are anxious to deal with, are alive in hisbooks. Our young people should know his _Rise of Silas Lapham_ and _AHazard of New Fortunes_, as well as his social and literary criticism. As stimulating and alluring a volume of selections may be made forhigh-school students as this volume will be, we venture to predict, forthe younger boys and girls of the elementary school. 

In this little book of readings we have made, we believe, an entirelylegitimate and desirable use of the books named above. _A Boy's Town_is a series of detachable pictures and episodes into which the boy--orthe healthy girl who loves boys' books--may dip, as the selections heregiven will, we believe, tempt him to do. The same is true of _The Flightof Pony Baker_. The volume is for class-room enjoyment; for happy hoursof profitable reading--profitable, because happy. Much of it should beread aloud rather than silently, and dramatic justice be done to thescenes and conversations which have dramatic quality. 

 PERCIVAL CHUBB. 

I

ADVENTURES IN A BOY'S TOWN

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

Just before the circus came, about the end of July, something happenedthat made Pony mean to run off more than anything that ever was. Hisfather and mother were coming home from a walk, in the evening; it wasso hot nobody could stay in the house, and just as they were coming tothe front steps Pony stole up behind them and tossed a snowball which hehad got out of the garden at his mother, just for fun. The flower struckher very softly on her hair, for she had no bonnet on, and she gave ajump and a hollo that made Pony laugh; and then she caught him by thearm and boxed his ears. 

"Oh, my goodness! It was you, was it, you good-for-nothing boy? Ithought it was a bat!" she said, and she broke out crying and ran intothe house, and would not mind his father, who was calling after her, "Lucy, Lucy, my dear child!"

Pony was crying, too, for he did not intend to frighten his mother, andwhen she took his fun as if he had done something wicked he did not knowwhat to think. He stole off to bed, and he lay there crying in the darkand expecting that she would come to him, as she always did, to have himsay that he was sorry when he had been wicked, or to tell him that shewas sorry when she thought she had not been quite fair with him. But shedid not come, and after a good while his father came and said: "Are youawake, Pony? I am sorry your mother misunderstood your fun. But youmustn't mind it, dear boy. She's not well, and she's very nervous. "

"I don't care!" Pony sobbed out. "She won't have a chance to touch meagain!" For he had made up his mind to run off with the circus which wascoming the next Tuesday. 

He turned his face away, sobbing, and his father, after standing by hisbed a moment, went away without saying anything but "Don't forget yourprayers, Pony. You'll feel differently in the morning, I hope. "

Pony fell asleep thinking how he would come back to the Boy's Town withthe circus when he was grown up, and when he came out in the ring ridingthree horses bareback he would see his father and mother and sisters inone of the lower seats. They would not know him, but he would know them, and he would send for them to come to the dressing-room, and would bevery good to them, all but his mother; he would be very cold and stiffwith her, though he would know that she was prouder of him than all therest put together, and she would go away almost crying. 

[Illustration: HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE VERY NEXTMORNING]

He began being cold and stiff with her the very next morning, althoughshe was better than ever to him, and gave him waffles for breakfast withunsalted butter, and tried to pet him up. That whole day she kept tryingto do things for him, but he would scarcely speak to her; and at nightshe came to him and said, "What makes you act so strangely, Pony? Areyou offended with your mother?"

"Yes, I am!" said Pony, haughtily, and he twitched away from where shewas sitting on the side of his bed, leaning over him. 

"On account of last night, Pony?" she asked, softly. 

"I reckon you know well enough, " said Pony, and he tried to be disgustedwith her for being such a hypocrite, but he had to set his teeth hard, hard, or he would have broken down crying. 

"If it's for that, you mustn't, Pony dear. You don't know how youfrightened me. When your snowball hit me, I felt sure it was a bat, andI'm so afraid of bats, you know. I didn't mean to hurt my poor boy'sfeelings so, and you mustn't mind it any more, Pony. "

She stooped down and kissed him on the forehead, but he did not move orsay anything; only, after that he felt more forgiving toward his mother. He made up his mind to be good to her along with the rest when he cameback with the circus. But still he meant to run off with the circus. Hedid not see how he could do anything else, for he had told all the boysthat day that he was going to do it; and when they just laughed, andsaid, "Oh yes. Think you can fool your grandmother! It'll be likerunning off with the Indians, " Pony wagged his head, and said they wouldsee whether it would or not, and offered to bet them what they dared. 

The morning of the circus day all the fellows went out to thecorporation line to meet the circus procession. There were ladies andknights, the first thing, riding on spotted horses; and then aband-chariot, all made up of swans and dragons. There were about twentybaggage-wagons; but before you got to them there was the greatest thingof all. It was a chariot drawn by twelve Shetland ponies, and it wasshaped like a big shell, and around in the bottom of the shell therewere little circus actors, boys and girls, dressed in their circusclothes, and they all looked exactly like fairies. They scarce seemedto see the fellows, as they ran alongside of their chariot, but HenBillard and Archy Hawkins, who were always cutting up, got close enoughto throw some peanuts to the circus boys, and some of the little circusgirls laughed, and the driver looked around and cracked his whip at thefellows, and they all had to get out of the way then. 

Jim Leonard said that the circus boys and girls were all stolen, andnobody was allowed to come close to them for fear they would try to sendword to their friends. Some of the fellows did not believe it, andwanted to know how he knew it; and he said he read it in a paper; afterthat nobody could deny it. But he said that if you went with the circusmen of your own free will they would treat you first-rate; only theywould give you burnt brandy to keep you little; nothing else but burntbrandy would do it, but that would do it, sure. 

Pony was scared at first when he heard that most of the circus fellowswere stolen, but he thought if he went of his own accord he would be allright. Still, he did not feel so much like running off with the circusas he did before the circus came. He asked Jim Leonard whether thecircus men made all the children drink burnt brandy; and Archy Hawkinsand Hen Billard heard him ask, and began to mock him. They took him upbetween them, one by his arms and the other by the legs, and ran alongwith him, and kept saying, "Does it want to be a great big circus actor?Then it shall, so it shall, " and, "We'll tell the circus men to be verycareful of you, Pony dear!" till Pony wriggled himself loose and beganto stone them. 

After that they had to let him alone, for when a fellow began to stoneyou in the Boy's Town you had to let him alone, unless you were going towhip him, and the fellows only wanted to have a little fun with Pony. But what they did made him all the more resolved to run away with thecircus, just to show them. 

He helped to carry water for the circus men's horses, along with theboys who earned their admission that way. He had no need to do it, because his father was going to take him in, anyway; but Jim Leonardsaid it was the only way to get acquainted with the circus men. Still, Pony was afraid to speak to them, and he would not have said a word toany of them if it had not been for one of them speaking to him first, when he saw him come lugging a great pail of water, and bending far overon the right to balance it. 

"That's right, " the circus man said to Pony. "If you ever fell into thatbucket you'd drown, sure. "

He was a big fellow, with funny eyes, and he had a white bulldog at hisheels; and all the fellows said he was the one who guarded the outsideof the tent when the circus began, and kept the boys from hooking inunder the curtain. 

Even then Pony would not have had the courage to say anything, but JimLeonard was just behind him with another bucket of water, and he spokeup for him. "He wants to go with the circus. "

They both set down their buckets, and Pony felt himself turning palewhen the circus man came toward them. "Wants to go with the circus, heigh? Let's have a look at you. " He took Pony by the shoulders andturned him slowly round, and looked at his nice clothes, and took him bythe chin. "Orphan?" he asked. 

Pony did not know what to say, but Jim Leonard nodded; perhaps he didnot know what to say, either; but Pony felt as if they had both told alie. 

"Parents living?" The circus man looked at Pony, and Pony had to saythat they were. 

He gasped out, "Yes, " so that you could scarcely hear him, and thecircus man said:

"Well, that's right. When we take an orphan, we want to have his parentsliving, so that we can go and ask them what sort of a boy he is. "

He looked at Pony in such a friendly, smiling way that Pony took courageto ask him whether they would want him to drink burnt brandy. 

"What for?"

"To keep me little. "

"Oh, I see. " The circus man took off his hat and rubbed his foreheadwith a silk handkerchief, which he threw into the top of his hat beforehe put it on again. "No, I don't know as we will. We're rather short ofgiants just now. How would you like to drink a glass of elephant milkevery morning and grow into an eight-footer?"

Pony said he didn't know whether he would like to be quite so big; andthen the circus man said perhaps he would rather go for an India-rubberman; that was what they called the contortionists in those days. 

"Let's feel of you again. " The circus man took hold of Pony and felt hisjoints. "You're put together pretty tight; but I reckon we could makeyou do if you'd let us take you apart with a screw-driver and limber upthe pieces with rattlesnake oil. Wouldn't like it, heigh? Well, let mesee!" The circus man thought a moment, and then he said: "How woulddouble-somersaults on four horses bareback do?"

Pony said that would do, and then the circus man said: "Well, then, we've just hit it, because our double-somersault, four-horse barebackis just going to leave us, and we want a new one right away. Now, there's more than one way of joining a circus, but the best way is towait on your front steps with your things all packed up, and theprocession comes along at about one o'clock in the morning and picks youup. Which'd you rather do?"

Pony pushed his toe into the turf, as he always did when he was ashamed, but he made out to say he would rather wait out on the front steps. 

"Well, then, that's all settled, " said the circus man. "We'll be along, "and he was going away with his dog, but Tim Leonard called after him:

"You hain't asked him whereabouts he lives?"

The circus man kept on, and he said, without looking around, "Oh, that'sall right. We've got somebody that looks after that. "

"It's the magician, " Jim Leonard whispered to Pony, and they walkedaway. 

THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN

A crowd of the fellows had been waiting to know what the boys had beentalking about to the circus man, but Jim Leonard said, "Don't you tell, Pony Baker!" and he started to run, and that made Pony run, too, andthey both ran till they got away from the fellows. 

"You have got to keep it a secret; for if a lot of fellows find it outthe constable'll get to know it, and he'll be watching out around thecorner of your house, and when the procession comes along and he seesyou're really going he'll take you up, and keep you in jail till yourfather comes and bails you out. Now, you mind!"

Pony said, "Oh, I won't tell anybody, " and when Jim Leonard said that ifa circus man was to feel _him_ over, that way, and act so kind ofpleasant and friendly, he would be too proud to speak to anybody, Ponyconfessed that he knew it was a great thing all the time. 

"The way'll be, " said Jim Leonard, "to keep in with him, and he'll keepthe others from picking on you; they'll be afraid to, on account of hisdog. You'll see, he'll be the one to come for you to-night; and if theconstable is there the dog won't let him touch you. I never thought ofthat. "

Perhaps on account of thinking of it now Jim Leonard felt free to tellthe other fellows how Pony was going to run off, for when a crowd ofthem came along he told them. They said it was splendid, and they saidthat if they could make their mothers let them, or if they could get outof the house without their mothers knowing it, they were going to situp with Pony and watch out for the procession, and bid him good-bye. 

At dinner-time he found out that his father was going to take him andall his sisters to the circus, and his father and mother were so nice tohim, asking him about the procession and everything, that his heartached at the thought of running away from home and leaving them. But nowhe had to do it; the circus man was coming for him, and he could notback out; he did not know what would happen if he did. It seemed to himas if his mother had done everything she could to make it harder forhim. She had stewed chicken for dinner, with plenty of gravy, and hotbiscuits to sop in, and peach preserves afterward; and she kept helpinghim to more, because she said boys that followed the circus around gotdreadfully hungry. The eating seemed to keep his heart down; it wastrying to get into his throat all the time; and he knew that she wasbeing good to him, but if he had not known it he would have believed hismother was just doing it to mock him. 

Pony had to go to the circus with his father and sisters, and to get onhis shoes and a clean collar. But a crowd of the fellows were there atthe tent door to watch out whether the circus man would say anything tohim when he went in; and Jim Leonard rubbed against him, when the manpassed with his dog and did not even look at Pony, and said: "He's justpretending. He don't want your father to know. He'll be round for you, sure. I saw him kind of smile to one of the other circus men. "

It was a splendid circus, and there were more things than Pony ever sawin a circus before. But instead of hating to have it over, it seemed tohim that it would never come to an end. He kept thinking and thinking, and wondering whether he would like to be a circus actor; and when theone came out who rode four horses bareback and stood on his head on thelast horse, and drove with the reins in his teeth, Pony thought that henever could learn to do it; and if he could not learn he did not knowwhat the circus men would say to him. It seemed to him that it was verystrange he had not told that circus man that he didn't know whether hecould do it or not; but he had not, and now it was too late. 

A boy came around calling lemonade, and Pony's father bought some foreach of the children, but Pony could hardly taste his. 

"What is the matter with you, Pony? Are you sick?" his father asked. 

"No. I don't care for any; that's all. I'm well, " said Pony; but he feltvery miserable. 

After supper Jim Leonard came round and went up to Pony's room with himto help him pack, and he was so gay about it and said he only wished_he_ was going, that Pony cheered up a little. Jim had brought a largesquare of checked gingham that he said he did not believe his motherwould ever want, and that he would tell her he had taken if she askedfor it. He said it would be the very thing for Pony to carry his clothesin, for it was light and strong and would hold a lot. He helped Pony tochoose his things out of his bureau drawers: a pair of stockings and apair of white pantaloons and a blue roundabout, and a collar, and twohandkerchiefs. That was all he said Pony would need, because he wouldhave his circus clothes right away, and there was no use taking thingsthat he would never wear. 

Jim did these up in the square of gingham, and he tied it acrosscater-cornered twice, in double knots, and showed Pony how he could puthis hand through and carry it just as easy. He hid it under the bed forhim, and he told Pony that if he was in Pony's place he should go to bedright away or pretty soon, so that nobody would think anything, andmaybe he could get some sleep before he got up and went down to wait onthe front steps for the circus to come along. He promised to be therewith the other boys and keep them from fooling or making a noise, ordoing anything to wake his father up, or make the constable come. "Yousee, Pony, " he said, "if you can run off this year, and come back withthe circus next year, then a whole lot of fellows can run off. Don't yousee that?"

Pony said he saw that, but he said he wished some of the other fellowswere going now, because he did not know any of the circus boys and hewas afraid he might feel kind of lonesome. But Jim Leonard said he wouldsoon get acquainted, and, anyway, a year would go before he knew it, andthen if the other fellows could get off he would have plenty of company. 

As soon as Jim Leonard was gone Pony undressed and got into bed. He wasnot sleepy, but he thought maybe it would be just as well to rest alittle while before the circus procession came along for him; and, anyway, he could not bear to go down-stairs and be with the family whenhe was going to leave them so soon, and not come back for a whole year. 

After a good while, or about the time he usually came in from playing, he heard his mother saying: "Where in the world is Pony? Has he come inyet? Have you seen him, girls? Pony! Pony!" she called. 

But somehow Pony could not get his voice up out of his throat; he wantedto answer her, but he could not speak. He heard her say, "Go out to thefront steps, girls, and see if you can see him, " and then he heard hercoming up the stairs; and she came into his room, and when she saw himlying there in bed, she said: "Why, I believe in my heart the child'sasleep! Pony! Are you awake?"

Pony made out to say no, and his mother said: "My! what a fright yougave me! Why didn't you answer me? Are you sick, Pony? Your father saidyou didn't seem well at the circus; and you didn't eat any supper, hardly. "

Pony said he was first-rate, but he spoke very low, and his mother cameup and sat down on the side of his bed. 

"What is the matter, child?" She bent over and felt his forehead. "No, you haven't got a bit of fever, " she said, and she kissed him, and beganto tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one ofhis hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. "But you've had a long, tiresome day, and that's why you've gone to bed, I suppose. But if youfeel the least sick, Pony, I'll send for the doctor. "

Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he feltas if he never wanted to get up again. 

His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close downto his, and said very low: "Pony dear, you don't feel hard toward yourmother for what she did the other night?"

He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and hesaid: "Oh no, " and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; andshe told him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again;but she was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing. 

When he quieted down, she said: "Now say your prayers, Pony, 'OurFather, '" and she said, "Our Father" all through with him, and afterthat, "Now I lay me, " just as when he was a very little fellow. Afterthey had finished she stooped over and kissed him again, and when heturned his face into his pillow she kept smoothing his hair with herhand for about a minute. Then she went away. 

Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. Hisfather came in from uptown at last, and asked: "Has Pony come in?"

And his mother said; "Yes, he's up in bed. I wouldn't disturb him, Henry. He's asleep by this time. "

His father said: "I don't know what to make of the boy. If he keeps onacting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning. "

Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in themorning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down tohis father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it didnot seem as if he could. 

By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thoughtit was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew thatthe procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on histhings as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve toit, somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers tokeep it on. He got his bundle and stole down to the front door withoutseeming to touch his feet to anything, and when he got out on the frontsteps he saw the circus magician coming along. By that time the musichad stopped and Pony could not see any procession. The magician had on atall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was sowide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretchedthem out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand inone hand, like a blind man. 

He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice, "It's all glory; it'sall glory, " and the sound of those words froze Pony's blood. He tried toget back into the house again, so that the magician should not find him, but when he felt for the door-knob there was no door there anywhere;nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried toshrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw hiswide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and thedoctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:

"He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled, " and he got out hislancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: "Pony, Pony! What's thematter? Have you got the nightmare?" and he woke up, and found it wasjust morning. 

The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to thinkthat by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, thathe hardly knew what to do. 

He was not very well for two or three days afterward, and his mother lethim stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick ornot. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he hadbeen going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened tothink of it plagued him a little and asked how he liked being a circusactor. 

Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician gotscared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men thatthey would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reasonwhy they didn't take him. Archy Hawkins said: "How long did you have towait on the front steps, Pony dear?" But after that he was pretty goodto him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretendthat Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see. 

Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on thefront steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed allof it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried tohelp him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he hadoverslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way hesaid, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and howmuch was not. 

JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

Jim Leonard's stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on arise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard's log-cabin. The boys calledit Jim Leonard's log-cabin, but it was really his mother's, and thestable was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable beganthe logs stopped, and it was weather-boarded the rest of the way, andthe roof was shingled. 

Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was looseclapboards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs inthe early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, inthe country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, andyou had to take Jim Leonard's word for it if you wanted to believe it. The little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterward it was agood thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he hadhis hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not havecared if it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his motherhad whipped him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it. 

He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to landwhen they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would havebeen just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right acrossthe river to Delorac's Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely hecould, but Hen Billard said:

"Well, why didn't you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?"

Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them thought hecould have done it if he could have got into the eddy that there wasover by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he could havecamped out and lived on fish till the river fell. 

It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, whichalways came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember. The country above the Boy's Town was under water for miles and miles. The river-bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all plantedover again when the water went down. The freshet tore away pieces oforchard, and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with logs andfence-rails and chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and horses. There was a dog chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling awfully;the boys would have given anything if they could have saved him, but theyellow river whirled him out of sight behind the middle pier of thebridge, which everybody was watching from the bank, expecting it to goany minute. The water was up within four or five feet of the bridge, andthe boys believed that if a good big log had come along and hit it, thebridge would have been knocked loose from its piers and carried down theriver. 

Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys all ran to watch itas soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper. After supper some of their mothers let them come back and stay tillbedtime, if they would promise to keep a full yard back from the edge ofthe bank. They could not be sure just how much a yard was, and theynearly all sat down on the edge and let their legs hang over. 

Jim Leonard was there, holloing and running up and down the bank, andshowing the other boys things away out in the river that nobody elsecould see; he said he saw a man out there. He had not been to supper, and he had not been to school all day, which might have been the reasonwhy he would rather stay with the men and watch the bridge than go hometo supper; his mother would have been waiting for him with a sucker fromthe pear-tree. He told the boys that while they were gone he went outwith one of the men on the bridge as far as the middle pier, and itshook like a leaf; he showed with his hand how it shook. 

Jim Leonard was a fellow who believed he did all kinds of things that hewould like to have done; and the big boys just laughed. That made JimLeonard mad, and he said that as soon as the bridge began to go, he wasgoing to run out on it and go with it; and then they would see whetherhe was a liar or not! They mocked him and danced round him till hecried. But Pony Baker, who had come with his father, believed that JimLeonard would really have done it; and at any rate, he felt sorry forhim when Jim cried. 

He stayed later than any of the little fellows, because his father waswith him, and even all the big boys had gone home except Hen Billard, when Pony left Jim Leonard on the bank and stumbled sleepily away, withhis hand in his father's. 

When Pony was gone, Hen Billard said: "Well, going to stay all night, Jim?"

And Jim Leonard answered back, as cross as could be, "Yes, I am!" And hesaid the men who were sitting up to watch the bridge were going to givehim some of their coffee, and that would keep him awake. But perhaps hethought this because he wanted some coffee so badly. He was awfullyhungry, for he had not had anything since breakfast, except a piece ofbread-and-butter that he got Pony Baker to bring him in his pocket whenhe came down from school at noontime. 

Hen Billard said, "Well, I suppose I won't see you any more, Jim;good-bye, " and went away laughing; and after a while one of the men sawJim Leonard hanging about, and asked him what he wanted there at thattime of night; and Jim could not say he wanted coffee, and so there wasnothing for him to do but go. There was nowhere for him to go but home, and he sneaked off in the dark. 

When he came in sight of the cabin he could not tell whether he wouldrather have his mother waiting for him with a whipping and some supper, or get to bed somehow with neither. He climbed softly over the backfence and crept up to the back door, but it was fast; then he creptround to the front door, and that was fast, too. There was no light inthe house, and it was perfectly still. 

All of a sudden it struck him that he could sleep in the stable-loft, and he thought what a fool he was not to have thought of it before. Thenotion brightened him up so that he got the gourd that hung beside thewell-curb and took it out to the stable with him; for now he rememberedthat the cow would be there, unless she was in somebody's garden-patchor cornfield. 

He noticed as he walked down toward the stable that the freshet had comeup over the flat, and just before the door he had to wade. But he was inhis bare feet, and he did not care; if he thought anything, he thoughtthat his mother would not come out to milk till the water went down, andhe would be safe till then from the whipping he must take, sooner orlater, for playing hooky. 

Sure enough, the old cow was in the stable, and she gave Jim Leonard asnort of welcome and then lowed anxiously. He fumbled through the darkto her side, and began to milk her. She had been milked only a few hoursbefore, and so he got only a gourdful from her. But it was allstrippings, and rich as cream, and it was smoking warm. It seemed to JimLeonard that it went down to his very toes when he poured it into histhroat, and it made him feel so good that he did not know what to do. 

There really was not anything for him to do but to climb up into theloft by the ladder in the corner of the stable, and lie down on the oldlast year's fodder. The rich, warm milk made Jim Leonard awfully sleepy, and he dropped off almost as soon as his head touched the cornstalks. The last thing he remembered was the hoarse roar of the freshet outside, and that was a lulling music in his ears. 

The next thing he knew, and he hardly knew that, was a soft, jolting, sinking motion, first to one side and then to the other; then he seemedto be going down, down, straight down, and then to be drifting off intospace. He rubbed his eyes and found it was full daylight, although itwas the daylight of early morning; and while he lay looking out of thestable-loft window and trying to make out what it all meant, he felt awash of cold water along his back, and his bed of fodder melted awayunder him and around him, and some loose planks of the loft floor swamweltering out of the window. Then he knew what had happened. The floodhad stolen up while he slept, and sapped the walls of the stable; thelogs had given way, one after another, and had let him down, with theroof, into the water. 

He got to his feet as well as he could, and floundered over the risingand falling boards to the window in the floating gable. One look outsideshowed him his mother's log-cabin safe on its rise of ground, and at thecorner the old cow, that must have escaped through the stable door hehad left open, and passed the night among the cabbages. She seemed tocatch sight of Jim Leonard when he put his head out, and she lowed tohim. 

Jim Leonard did not stop to make any answer. He clambered out of thewindow and up onto the ridge of the roof, and there, in the company of alarge gray rat, he set out on the strangest voyage a boy ever made. In afew moments the current swept him out into the middle of the river, andhe was sailing down between his native shore on one side and Delorac'sIsland on the other. 

All round him seethed and swirled the yellow flood in eddies andripples, where drift of all sorts danced and raced. His vessel, such asit was, seemed seaworthy enough. It held securely together, fitting likea low, wide cup over the water, and perhaps finding some buoyancy fromthe air imprisoned in it above the window. But Jim Leonard was notsatisfied, and so far from being proud of his adventure, he wasfrightened worse even than the rat which shared it. As soon as he couldget his voice, he began to shout for help to the houses on the emptyshores, which seemed to fly backward on both sides while he lay still onthe gulf that swashed around him, and tried to drown his voice before itswallowed him up. At the same time the bridge, which had looked so faroff when he first saw it, was rushing swiftly toward him, and gettingnearer and nearer. 

He wondered what had become of all the people and all the boys. Hethought that if he were safe there on shore he should not be sleeping inbed while somebody was out in the river on a roof, with nothing but arat to care whether he got drowned or not. 

Where was Hen Billard, that always made fun so; or Archy Hawkins, thatpretended to be so good-natured; or Pony Baker, that seemed to like afellow so much? He began to call for them by name: "Hen Billard--_O_Hen! Help, help! Archy Hawkins--_O_ Archy! I'm drowning! Pony, Pony--_O_Pony! Don't you _see_ me, Pony?"

He could see the top of Pony Baker's house, and he thought what a good, kind man Pony's father was. Surely _he_ would try to save him; and JimLeonard began to yell: "O Mr. Baker! Look here, Mr. Baker! It's JimLeonard, and I'm floating down the river on a roof! Save me, Mr. Baker, save me! Help, help, somebody! Fire! Fire! Fire! Murder! Fire!"

By this time he was about crazy, and did not half know what he wassaying. Just in front of where Hen Billard's grandmother lived, on thestreet that ran along the top of the bank, the roof got caught in thebranches of a tree which had drifted down and stuck in the bottom of theriver so that the branches waved up and down as the current swashedthrough them. Jim Leonard was glad of anything that would stop the roof, and at first he thought he would get off on the tree. That was what therat did. Perhaps the rat thought Jim Leonard really was crazy and he hadbetter let him have the roof to himself; but the rat saw that he hadmade a mistake, and he jumped back again after he had swung up and downon a limb two or three times. Jim Leonard felt awfully when the ratfirst got into the tree, for he remembered how it said in the PirateBook that rats always leave a sinking ship, and now he believed that hecertainly was gone. But that only made him hollo the louder, and heholloed so loud that at last he made somebody hear. 

It was Hen Billard's grandmother, and she put her head out of the windowwith her nightcap on, to see what the matter was. Jim Leonard caughtsight of her, and he screamed: "Fire, fire, fire! I'm drownding, Mrs. Billard! Oh, do somebody come!"

Hen Billard's grandmother just gave one yell of "Fire! The world'sa-burnin' up, Hen Billard, and you layin' there sleepin' and not helpin'a bit! Somebody's out there in the river!" and she rushed into the roomwhere Hen was, and shook him. 

He bounced out of bed and pulled on his pantaloons, and was down-stairsin a minute. He ran bareheaded over to the bank, and when Jim Leonardsaw him coming he holloed ten times as loud: "It's me, Hen! It's JimLeonard! Oh, do get somebody to come out and save me! Fire!"

As soon as Hen heard that, and felt sure it was not a dream, which hedid in about half a second, he began to yell, too, and to say: "How didyou get there? Fire, fire, fire! What are you on? Fire! Are you in atree, or what? Fire, fire! Are you in a flat-boat? Fire, fire, fire! IfI had a skiff--fire!"

He kept racing up and down the bank, and back and forth between the bankand the houses. The river was almost up to the top of the bank, and itlooked a mile wide. Down at the bridge you could hardly see any lightbetween the water and the bridge. 

Pretty soon people began to look out of their doors and windows, and HenBillard's grandmother kept screaming: "The world's a-burnin' up! Theriver's on fire!" Then boys came out of their houses; and then men withno hats on; and then women and girls, with their hair half down. Thefire-bells began to ring, and in less than five minutes both the firecompanies were on the shore, with the men at the brakes and the foremenof the companies holloing through their trumpets. 

Then Jim Leonard saw what a good thing it was that he had thought ofholloing fire. He felt sure now that they would save him somehow, and hemade up his mind to save the rat, too, and pet it, and maybe go aroundand exhibit it. He would name it Bolivar; it was just the color of theelephant Bolivar that came to the Boy's Town every year. These thingswhirled through his brain while he watched two men setting out in askiff toward him. 

They started from the shore a little above him, and they meant to rowslanting across to his tree, but the current, when they got fairly intoit, swept them far below, and they were glad to row back to land againwithout ever getting anywhere near him. At the same time, the tree-topwhere his roof was caught was pulled southward by a sudden rush of thetorrent; it opened, and the roof slipped out, with Jim Leonard and therat on it. They both joined in one squeal of despair as the river leapedforward with them, and a dreadful "Oh!" went up from the people on thebank. 

Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that theskiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of thewindow of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand. It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the menused to catch driftwood with and drag it ashore. When the people sawBlue Bob with that pole in his hand, they understood what he was up to. He was going to wait till the water brought the roof with Jim Leonard onit down to the bridge, and then catch the hook into the shingles andpull it up to the pier. The strongest current set close in around themiddle pier, and the roof would have to pass on one side or the other. That was what Blue Bob argued out in his mind when he decided that theskiff would never reach Jim Leonard, and he knew that if he could notsave him that way, nothing could save him. 

Blue Bob must have had a last name, but none of the little fellows knewwhat it was. Everybody called him Blue Bob because he had such a thick, black beard that when he was just shaved his face looked perfectly blue. He knew all about the river and its ways, and if it had been of any useto go out with a boat, he would have gone. That was what all the boyssaid, when they followed Blue Bob to the bridge and saw him getting outon the pier. He was the only person that the watchman had let go on thebridge for two days. 

The water was up within three feet of the floor, and if Jim Leonard'sroof slipped by Blue Bob's guard and passed under the bridge, it wouldscrape Jim Leonard off, and that would be the last of him. 

All the time the roof was coming nearer the bridge, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, just as it got into an eddy or into the current; onceit seemed almost to stop, and swayed completely round; then it justdarted forward. 

Blue Bob stood on the very point of the pier, where the strongstone-work divided the current, and held his hooked pole ready to make aclutch at the roof, whichever side it took. Jim Leonard saw him there, but although he had been holloing and yelling and crying all the time, now he was still. He wanted to say, "O Bob, save me!" but he could notmake a sound. 

It seemed to him that Bob was going to miss him when he made a lunge atthe roof on the right side of the pier; it seemed to him that the roofwas going down the left side; but he felt it quiver and stop, and thenit gave a loud crack and went to pieces, and flung itself away upon thewhirling and dancing flood. At first Jim Leonard thought he had gonewith it; but it was only the rat that tried to run up Blue Bob's pole, and slipped off into the water; and then somehow Jim was hanging ontoBlue Bob's hands and scrambling onto the bridge. 

Blue Bob always said he never saw any rat, and a good many people saidthere never was any rat on the roof with Jim Leonard; they said that hejust made the rat up. 

He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Bakerthat he did not think of it at first, he was so excited. 

Pony asked his father what he thought, and Pony's father said that itmight have been the kind of rat that people see when they have beendrinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he hadsigned the temperance pledge. 

But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonardstanding safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular electioncheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They allagreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to hismother, for he had saved Jim's life, and he ought to have the credit ofit. 

Before this, and while everybody supposed that Jim Leonard would surelybe drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother's cabin toprepare her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, andshe kept round getting breakfast, with her old clay pipe in her mouth;but when she got it through her head, she made an awful face, anddropped her pipe on the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw hercheck apron over her head and sat down and cried. 

But it took so long for her to come to this that the people had not gotover comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all forthe best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim'sshoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them. 

Jim's mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw thatJim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that madehim slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife, and she came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker. 

She said, "I'll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he's got adecent bed in the house!" and then she started to come toward JimLeonard. 

II

LIFE IN A BOY'S TOWN

THE TOWN

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 mostthings. .. . Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep the ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence;heaven has been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. Thesewill not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hopethat the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys of to-day will liketo know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no veryexciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadthescapes; but it is the same thing--they have been used so often. I shalltry to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, andit may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might havebeen almost anybody's boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy ingeneral, 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 iceof the 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. 

EARLIEST MEMORIES

Some of my boy's 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 mean time 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 drawn itserasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down and builtup brick by brick in quite another place; but the blooming peach-treeglows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change. The tender, pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long years afterwardin the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, but always with areminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smoky town on thebanks of the Ohio. 

Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpseof a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with its head upand its 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. 

HOME LIFE

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 in uses;nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe not so muchuse. 

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 have heard him read was Moore's_Lalla Rookh_, of which he formed but a vague notion, though while hestruggled after its meaning he took all its music in, and began at onceto make rhymes of his own. He had no conception of literature except thepleasure there was in making it; and he had no outlook into the world ofit, which must have been pretty open to his father. The father readaloud some of Dickens' Christmas stories, then new; and the boy had agood deal of trouble with the _Haunted Man_. One rarest night of all, the family sat up till two o'clock, listening to a novel that my boylong ago forgot the name of, if he ever knew its name. It was all abouta will, forged or lost, and there was a great scene in court, and afterthat the mother declared that she could not go to bed till she heard theend. His own first reading was in history. At nine years of age he readthe history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew thatGoldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about DonQuixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read itover and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was hiselder brother who read novels, and a novel was like _Handy Andy_, or_Harry Lorrequer_, or the _Bride of Lammermoor_. His brother had anothernovel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library ofSelect Novels, " and was called _Alamance; or, the Great and FinalExperiment_, and it was about the life of some sort of community inNorth Carolina. It bewitched them, and though my boy could not afterwardrecall a single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind'seye every trait of its outward aspect. 

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 afterward to make him doubtful of all giving, except thehumblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving atall. 

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. 

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 thedraught 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. 

SWIMMING

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, andtheir fishing-time vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in fullpossession of the river, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town. 

[Illustration]

The swimming-holes in the river were the greatest favorites. My boycould not remember when he began to go into them, though it certainlywas before he could swim. There was a time when he was afraid of gettingin over his head; but he did not know just when he learned to swim, anymore than he knew when he learned to read; he could not swim, and thenhe could swim; he could not read, and then he could read; but I dare saythe reading came somewhat before the swimming. Yet the swimming musthave come very early, and certainly it was kept up with continualpractise; he swam quite as much as he read; perhaps more. The boys haddeep swimming-holes and shallow ones; and over the deep ones there wasalways a spring-board, from which they threw somersaults, or divedstraight down into the depths, where there were warm and cold currentsmysteriously interwoven. They believed that these deep holes wereinfested by water-snakes, though they never saw any, and they expectedto be bitten by snapping-turtles, though this never happened. Fierydragons could not have kept them out; gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believed to abound at the bottom of thedeep holes; but the boys never stayed long in the deep holes, and theypreferred the shallow places, where the river broke into a long ripple(they called it riffle) on its gravelly bed, and where they could atonce soak and bask in the musical rush of the sunlit waters. I haveheard people in New England blame all the Western rivers for beingyellow and turbid; but I know that after the spring floods, when theMiami had settled down to its summer business with the boys, it was asclear and as blue as if it were spilled out of the summer sky. The boysliked the riffle because they could stay in so long there, and therewere little land-locked pools and shallows, where the water was evenwarmer, and they could stay in longer. At most places under the banksthere was clay of different colors, which they used for war-paint intheir Indian fights; and after they had their Indian fights they couldrush screaming and clattering into the riffle. When the stream hadwashed them clean down to their red sunburn or their leathern tan, theycould paint up again and have more Indian fights. 

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, some sortof sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone. Sincethis is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, at onetime or other, must have told lies about it, either before or after thefact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and there aboy, like my boy's elder brother, would not tell lies at all, even aboutgoing in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to their hardfate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, and thenthey said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they had madethis sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got their shirts onwrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, some enemy cameupon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties which publicopinion in the boy's world condemns, but I am glad to remember, to theirhonor, that there were not many in that Boy's Town who would tie shirts;and I fervently hope that there is no boy now living who would do it. Asthe crime is probably extinct, I will say that in those wicked days, ifyou were such a miscreant, and there was some boy you hated, you stoleup and tied the hardest kind of a knot in one arm or both arms of hisshirt. Then, if the Evil One put it into your heart, you soaked the knotin 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, andit covered 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. 

SKATING

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. Helearned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew justthe moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fondof skating, and kept at it all day long when there was ice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a very little icego a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it for skating as soonas there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them ever got drownedthere; though a boy would often start from one bank and go flying to theother, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin sheet sank andswayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the ice was notthick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have been on icewhich was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all one bitterafternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first his feetwere very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and at last hedid not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he told one ofthe big boys. "Why, your feet are frozen!" said the big boy, and hedragged 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 afterward 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 stones, betweenyour flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from thefrozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among theembers. 

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 mean while 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 always had 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. 

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. 

GIRLS

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 games obligedthem to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, it was notgood form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he had toconceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless he wantedto be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were having funthey did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard a boymight play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sisters andtheir friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such things werenot 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. 

MOTHERS

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 woodshed, and only went in as far as the kitchen to getthings for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers who wouldmake 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 stovepipe. 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. 

I have tried to give some notion of the general distribution of comfort, which was never riches, in the Boy's Town; but I am afraid that I couldnot paint the simplicity of things there truly without beingmisunderstood in these days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in townmight be worth twenty thousand dollars. There were distinctions amongthe grown people, and no doubt there were the social cruelties which arethe modern expression of the savage spirit otherwise repressed bycivilization; but these were unknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages. They valued a boy for his character andprowess, and it did not matter in the least that he was ragged anddirty. Their mothers might not allow him the run of their kitchens quiteso freely as some other boys, but the boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how little he was washed and dressed. The best ofthem had not an overcoat; and underclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up his roundabout, and put on his mittens, andtied his comforter round his neck and over his ears, he was warmlydressed. 

A BROTHER

My boy was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elderbrother of his; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have abrother about four years older than yourself, I should say; and if yourtemper is 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 mustache 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 silkworms; 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 fire-bells 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. My boy's brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots offellows fell 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, if notthe boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took to theirheels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as that cow gothome, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she had beenshot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that he didnot 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 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. Afterward 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 alaugher as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so thattwo by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and fun. Hebecame the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes butsteadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a privatesoldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in manybattles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, everafter, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till hedied not long ago at his post of duty--a true, generous, and loftysoul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem commonerin America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our millionairesand statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their nobly simplelives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word for word, deedfor deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of Monte Cristo, orany hero of romance; and so would the common story of any common life. But we cannot tell these stories, somehow. 

A FRIEND

My boy's closest friend was a boy who was probably never willingly atschool in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learningin him than the open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. Idare say it was a sense of his kinship with Nature that took my boy withhim, and rested his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like a piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling orspinning in him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force oraim. He lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of acornfield on the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went tofind him there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two orthree large sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But theboys had very little to do with each other's houses, or, for thatmatter, with each other's yards. His friend seldom entered my boy'sgate, and never his door; for with all the toleration his father feltfor every manner of human creature, he could not see what good the boywas to get from this queer companion. It is certain that he got no harm;for his companion was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low as the ground under foot, but morally he was as good asany boy in the Boy's Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had noimpulses at all, in fact, and of his own motion he never did anything, or seemed to think anything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simplyappeared in the neighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fencetill he came out. He did not whistle, or call "E-oo-we!" as the otherfellows did, but waited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone offwith wherever my boy listed. He never had any plans himself, and neverany will but to go in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he didnot even fish; and I suppose that money could not have hired him to runraces. He played marbles, but not very well, and he did not care muchfor the game. The two boys soaked themselves in the river together, andthen they lay on the sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; butmy boy could not have talked to him about any of the things that were inhis books, or the fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He mustrather have soothed against his soft, caressing ignorance the ache ofhis fantastic spirit, and reposed his intensity of purpose in that laxand easy aimlessness. Their friendship was not only more innocent thanany other friendship my boy had, but it was wholly innocent; they lovedeach other, and that was all; and why people love one another there isnever any satisfactory telling. But this friend of his must have hadgreat natural good in him; and if I could find a man of the make of thatboy I am sure I should love 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 to say now 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, toward theend 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. 

III

GAMES AND PASTIMES

MARBLES

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 andbull'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 is 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 his walkinground or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginia sense foramiability; a person who was clever in the English sense was smart. 

RACES

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 stepmother any more. 

[Illustration]

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. 

A MEAN TRICK

There were shade-trees all along the street, that you could climb if youwanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had run yourselfout of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctly remembered thatunder one of these trees his elder brother first broached to him thatawful scheme of reform about fibbing, and applied to their own lives themoral of _The Trippings of Tom Pepper_; he remembered how a convictionof the righteousness of the scheme sank into his soul, and he could notwithhold his consent. Under the same tree, and very likely at the sametime, a solemn conclave of boys, all the boys there were, discussed thefeasibility of tying a tin can to a dog's tail, and seeing how he wouldact. They had all heard of the thing, but none of them had seen it; andit was not so much a question of whether you ought to do a thing that onthe very face of it would be so much fun, and if it did not amuse thedog as highly as anybody, could certainly do him no harm, as it was aquestion of whose dog you should get to take the dog's part in thesport. It was held that an old dog would probably not keep still longenough for you to tie the can on; he would have his suspicions; or elsehe would not run when the can was tied on, but very likely just go andlie down somewhere. The lot finally fell to a young yellow dog belongingto one of the boys, and the owner at once ran home to get him, andeasily lured him back to the other boys with flatteries and caresses. The flatteries and caresses were not needed, for a dog is always glad togo with boys, upon any pretext, and so far from thinking that he doesthem a favor, he feels himself greatly honored. But I dare say the boyhad a guilty fear that if his dog had known why he was invited to be ofthat party of boys, he might have pleaded a previous engagement. As itwas, he came joyfully, and allowed the can to be tied to his tailwithout misgiving. If there had been any question with the boys as towhether he would enter fully into the spirit of the affair, it must havebeen instantly dissipated by the dogs behavior when he felt the looptighten on his tail, and looked round to see what the matter was. Theboys hardly had a chance to cheer him before he flashed out of sightround the corner, and they hardly had time to think before he flashedinto sight again from the other direction. He whizzed along the ground, and the can hurtled in the air, but there was no other sound, and thecheers died away on the boys' lips. The boy who owned the dog began tocry, and the other fellows began to blame him for not stopping the dog. But he might as well have tried to stop a streak of lightning; the onlything you could do was to keep out of the dog's way. As an experiment itwas successful beyond the wildest dreams of its projectors, though itwould have been a sort of relief if the dog had taken some other road, for variety, or had even reversed his course. But he kept on as hebegan, and by a common impulse the boys made up their minds to abandonthe whole affair to him. They all ran home and hid, or else walked aboutand tried to ignore it. But at this point the grown-up people began tobe interested; the mothers came to their doors to see what was thematter. Yet even the mothers were powerless in a case like that, and theenthusiast had to be left to his fate. He was found under a barn atlast, breathless, almost lifeless, and he tried to bite the man whountied the can from his tail. Eventually he got well again, and livedto be a solemn warning to the boys; he was touchingly distrustful oftheir advances for a time, but he finally forgot and forgave everything. They did not forget, and they never tried tying a tin can to a dog'stail again, among all the things they tried and kept trying. Once wasenough; and they never even liked to talk of it, the sight was so awful. They were really fond of the dog, and if they could have thought hewould take the matter so seriously, they would not have tried to havethat kind of fun with him. It cured them of ever wanting to have thatkind of fun with any dog. 

TOPS

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 themetal 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 forefinger 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 a baseball. 

KITES

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 thesmallest boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks inthe form of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared onthe Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as akind of girl. 

The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind best, andflew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was thehouse kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in theform of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the basethan at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of all thesekites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a string carried tautfrom stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to hold it; sometimesthe sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing, and sometimesthey were mortised into one another; but this was apt to weaken them. The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paper was cut aninch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over the string. Most ofthe boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; but my boy and hisbrother could usually get paste from the printing-office; and when theycould not they would make it by mixing flour and water cream-thick, andslowly boiling it. That was a paste that would hold till the cows camehome, the boys said, and my boy was courted for his skill in making it. But after the kite was pasted, and dried in the sun, or behind thekitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (and you nearlyalways were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands and tail-bands; thatis, with strings carried from stick to stick over the face and at thebottom, to attach the cord for flying it and to fasten on the tail by. This took a good deal of art, and unless it were well done the kitewould not balance, but would be always pitching and darting. Then thetail had to be of just the right weight; if it was too heavy the kitekept sinking, even after you got it up where otherwise it would stand;if too light, the kite would dart, and dash itself to pieces on theground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists of paper across astring a foot apart, till there were enough to balance the kite; butthis sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the best tail was made ofa long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft of dog-fennel at theend. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just the right weight wasgot; and when this was done, after several experimental tests, the kitewas laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, or on a longstretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tail stretchedcarefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. You unwound agreat length of twine, running backward, and letting the twine slipswiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then you seizedthe ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that all wasright, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from the ground, and swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into the air, withits long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swung free. Ifthere was not much surface wind you might have to run a little way, butas soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straightened itself, pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave it more andmore twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ran throughyour hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, at such aheight that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight in thedistance. 

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. 

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. 

THE BUTLER GUARDS

The Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I donot believe there was a fellow in the Boy's Town who 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 backward 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 so muchin their quality of soldiers that they would any of them have been proudto be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed the Dutchmen roundin their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Of course, schoollet out when there was a regular muster, and the boys gave the whole dayto it; but I do not know just when the Muster Day came. They fired thecannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they must have campedsomewhere near the town, though no recollection of tents remained in myboy's mind. He believed with the rest of the boys that the right way tofire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touch it off, but justkeep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it away when you wanted thecannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram the piece full ofdog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then he expected the cannonto burst. But it only roared away as usual. 

PETS

[Illustration]

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 smelled, pretty soon, like an animal-show;he would 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 oran 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, andwhich a boy held on either side of him. But if he caught sight of a dogthat he did not know, he would drop that stick and start for that dog asfar off as he could see him, spilling the Henry Clay Club out of thewagon piecemeal as he went, and never stopping till he mixed up thestrange dog in a fight where it would have been hard to tell which waseither champion and which was the club wagon. When the fight was overTip would come smilingly back to the fragments of the Henry Clay Club, with pieces of the vehicle sticking about him, and profess himself, in adog'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 asthe family lived in the Boy's Town, the children were anxious about Tipwhen the dog-law was put in force, and the constables went roundshooting all the dogs that were found running at large without muzzles. At this time, when Tip was in danger of going mad and biting people, heshowed a most unseasonable activity, and could hardly be kept in bounds. A dog whose sole delight at other moments was to bask in the summer sun, or dream by the winter fire, would now rouse himself to an interest ineverything that was going on in the dangerous world, and make foraysinto it at all unguarded points. The only thing to do was to muzzle him, and this was done by my boy's brother with a piece of heavy twine, insuch a manner as to interfere with Tip's happiness as little aspossible. It was a muzzle that need not be removed for either eating, drinking, or fighting; but it satisfied the law, and Tip always camesafely through the dog-days, perhaps by favor or affection with theofficers who were so inexorable with some dogs. 

While 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. 

But all were trifling joys, except maybe Tip and Nanny, compared withthe 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 the boywanted was an English saddle, embroidered on the morocco seat in crimsonsilk, and furnished with shining steel stirrups. What he had was theframework of a Mexican saddle, covered with rawhide, and cushioned witha blanket; the stirrups were Mexican, too, and clumsily fashioned out ofwood. The boys were always talking about getting their father to getthem a pad, but they never did it, and they managed as they could withthe saddle they had. For the most part they preferred to ride the ponybarebacked, for then they could ride him double, and when they firstgot him they all wanted to ride him so much that they had to ride himdouble. They kept him going the whole day long; but after a while theycalmed 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 use in Indian fights, for he could seldom be lashed into agallop, and a pony that proposed to walk through an Indian fight wasridiculous. Still, with the help of imagination, my boy employed him insome scenes of wild Arab life, and hurled the Moorish javelin from himin 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, andmy boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that werenot very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, andthey 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 mean time 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. 

INDIANS

There was not a boy in the Boy's Town who would not gladly have turnedfrom the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and inevery vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city ofrefuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so closeto those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys'fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burnedin the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of thewoods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At anyrate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking amongthemselves of how they would go farther West when they grew up, and betrappers and hunters. I do not remember any boy but one who meant to bea sailor; they lived too hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say theboy who invented the marine-engine governor, and who wished to be apirate, would just as soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In thosedays Oregon had just been opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted togo and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deerand wild turkey, while a salmon big enough to pull you in was tuggingaway at the line you had set in the river that ran before thelog-cabin. 

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 mean time, 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 courthouse yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows. It almost made the boys crazy. 

[Illustration: ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE]

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. 

GUNS

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 wasthe normal desire of every boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy, and there were mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point apistol would do, especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could runbullets to shoot out of it; only your mother would be sure to see yourunning them, and just as likely as not would be so scared that shewould say you must not shoot bullets. Then you would have to usebuckshot, if you could get them anywhere near the right size, or smallmarbles; but a pistol was always a makeshift, and you never could hitanything with it, not even a board fence; it always kicked, or burst, orsomething. 

Very few boys ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to haveone. But seven or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, andtake turn-about shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shootat all, but they could run and see whether the big boys had hit anythingwhen they fired, and that was something. This was my boy's privilege fora long time before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently withhis elder brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shoot the load off before they got back to town; they were notallowed to bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safefor anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was goingto do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy'sbrother bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as thehalf-real piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from onegunsmith and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this tooktime; 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 smooth-borerifle, and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have beennearly ten years old. 

It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have a gun; but he wasmortified the very next morning after he got it by a citizen who thoughtdifferently. He had risen at daybreak to go out and shoot kildees on theCommon, and he was hurrying along with his gun on his shoulder when thecitizen stopped him and asked him what he was going to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added that it was his gun. This seemedto surprise the citizen even more than the boy could have wished. Heasked him if he did not think he was a pretty small boy to have a gun;and he took the gun from him, and examined it thoughtfully, and thenhanded it back to the boy, who felt himself getting smaller all thetime. The man went his way without saying anything more, but hisbehavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boy had no pleasure in hissport that morning; partly, perhaps, because he found no kildees toshoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gun once or twice at afence, and then he sneaked home with it through alleys and by-ways, andwhenever he met a person he hurried by for fear the person would findhim too small to have a gun. 

Afterward 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 very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killeda bird. It was a suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to stealupon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of thatwandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boycould bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when hisfather came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boastedof his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether hehad expected to eat this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of ittogether. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you tookits poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it, " said thefather. "Was it a great pleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his headin shame and silence; it seemed to him that he would never go huntingagain. Of course he did go hunting often afterward, but his brother andhe kept faithfully to the rule of never killing anything that they didnot want to eat. To be sure, they gave themselves a wide range; theywere willing to eat almost anything that they could shoot, evenblackbirds, which were so abundant and so easy to shoot. But there weresome things which they would have thought it not only wanton but wickedto kill, like turtle-doves, which they somehow believed were sacred, norrobins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they keptabout the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a shame toshoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the turtle-doves, which used to light on the Basin bank, and pick up the grain scatteredthere from the boats and wagons. 

There were a good many things you could do with a gun: you could fireyour ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the air; you could fillthe muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and send the water in astraight column at a fence. The boys all believed that you could firethat column of water right through a man, and they always wanted to trywhether it would go through a cow, but they were afraid the owner of thecow would find it out. There was a good deal of pleasure in cleaningyour gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck in it and you couldhardly get it out. You poured hot water into the muzzle and blew itthrough the nipple, till it began to show clear; then you wiped it drywith soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled it with greasytow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw, and stay in thebarrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in at the nippleto blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old muzzle-loadingshot-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 all over;he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they were going, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, and led theway across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks on thegrass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild, clamorous cries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back with my boyand let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right to thefirst shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and crept along tothe place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold on Tip'scollar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning. Theplace so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that pale light, and he was glad of old Tip's company, for it seemed a time when theremight very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet of smooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, and through theseat last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro, and he couldcatch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood still and then jumpedwildly in his breast, as the still air was startled with the rush ofwings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocks arriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopes he willlose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he bet that hedid not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got a shot atthem, they would not come back so that he could get a chance himself tokill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, and just when hewas going to hollo, and tell his brother where the ducks were, the oldsmooth-bore sent out a red flash and a white puff before he heard thereport; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard the splashing riseof the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; and he ran forward, yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Where are you? Are theycoming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcry that would havefrightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a flock of ducks. 

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

NUTTING

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 wagon could last till the next year; it did very well ifit lasted till the next day. He had to make it nearly all with hispocket-knife. He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pineboard, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of theblocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, andhe made the hubs with it. He could get a tongue ready-made if he used abroom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittledso it could be fastened to the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holeswith his knife if he could not get a gimlet; and if he could not get anauger, he bored the holes through the wheels with a red-hot poker, andthen whittled them large enough with his knife. He had to use pine fornearly everything, because any other wood was too hard to whittle; andthen the pine was always splitting. It split in the axles when he wasmaking the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpinsthat were tied in; the wheels themselves split, and had to bestrengthened by slats nailed across the rifts. The wagon-bed was acandle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front axle tight, sothat it took the whole width of a street to turn a very little wagon inwithout upsetting. 

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 woodshed, 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. 

[Illustration: NUTTING]

The leaves had dropped from the trees overhead, and the branchesoutlined themselves against the blue sky, and dangled from their outerstems clusters of the unfallen fruit, as large as oranges, and onlywanting a touch to send them plumping down into the grass wheresometimes their fat hulls burst, and the nuts almost leaped into theboy's hands. The boys ran, some of them to gather the fallen nuts, andothers to get clubs and rocks to beat them from the trees; one was sureto throw off his jacket and kick off his shoes and climb the tree toshake every limb where a walnut was still clinging. When they had gotthem all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows of a stick, or with stones, and topick the nuts from the hulls, where the grubs were battening on theirassured ripeness, and to toss them into a little heap, a very littleheap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from. The boysgloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for days that they had beenwalnutting; sometimes they got to staining one another's faces with thejuice, 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 I haveto 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 woodshed 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. 

THE FIRE-ENGINES

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 never dared; andthe foreman of the _Neptune_, which was the larger and feebler of theengines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyes that hefelt 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 brakes 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 the boys, though they believed thatthe _Tremont_ could squirt farther, and they had a belief in its quietefficiency which was fostered by its reticence in public. It was smalland black, but the _Neptune_ was large, and painted of a gay color litup with gilding that sent the blood leaping through a boy's veins. Theboys knew the _Neptune_ was out of order, but they were always expectingit would come right, and in the mean time they felt that it was an honorto the town, and they followed it as proudly back to the engine-houseafter one of its magnificent failures as if it had been a magnificentsuccess. The boys were always making magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for the _Neptune_. 

IV

GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

The boys made a very careful study of the circus bills, and when thecircus came they held the performance to a strict account for anydifference between the feats and their representation. For a fortnightbeforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of the circus intoa fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question with a great manywhether they could get their fathers to give them the money to go in. The full price was two bits, and the half-price was a bit, or a Spanishreal, then a commoner coin than the American dime in the West; and everyboy, for that time only, wished to be little enough to look young enoughto go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a free ticket for everymember of their families; and my boy was sure of going to the circusfrom the first rumor of its coming. But he was none the less deeplythrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on the morning of thegreat day, to go out and meet the circus procession beyond thecorporation 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, thebareback-rider, and which was O'Dale, the champion tumbler; which wasthe India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown. 

Covered with dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours' run besidethe procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrivedwith it on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, andthe ring was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headedtent-stakes, and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of thepavilion which they were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys werenot allowed to come anywhere near, except three or four who got leave tofetch water from a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paidwith half-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word withthem as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had moneyto go in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory ofcoming close to the circus men. They stood about in twos and threes, andlay upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was betterthan a saw-dust 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 circus doors were open, the doorkeepers of theside-shows were inviting people to come in and see the giants and fatwoman and boa-constrictors, and there were stands for peanuts and candyand lemonade; the vendors cried, "Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteenhundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way you getup!" The boys thought this brilliant drolling, but they had no time tolisten after the doors were open, and they had no money to spend onside-shows or dainties anyway. Inside the tent they found it dark andcool, and their hearts thumped in their throats with the wild joy ofbeing there; they recognized one another with amaze, as if they had notmet for years, and the excitement kept growing as other fellows came in. It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys calledthe farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and now some of themtried to act smart with the circus men that came round with oranges tosell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they weregoing to hook in really got in. The boys held it to be a high andcreditable thing to hook into a show of any kind, but hooking into acircus was something that a fellow ought to be held in special honor fordoing. He ran great risks, and if he escaped the vigilance of themassive circus man who patrolled the outside of the tent with a cow-hideand a bulldog, perhaps he merited the fame 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 theboys; they would have despised a thief as he deserved, and I cannotremember one of them who might not have been safely trusted. None ofthem would have taken an apple out of a market-wagon, or stolen a melonfrom a farmer who came to town with it; but they would all have thoughtit fun, if not right, to rob an orchard or hook a watermelon out of apatch. This would have been a foray into the enemy's country, and thefruit of the adventure would have been the same as the plunder of acity, or the capture of a vessel belonging to him on the high seas. Inthe same way, if one of the boys had seen a circus man drop a quarter, he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only havebeen proud to hook into the circus man's show, and the other fellowswould have been proud of his exploit, too, as something that did honorto them all. As a person who enclosed bounds and forbade trespass, thecircus man constituted himself the enemy of every boy who respectedhimself, and challenged him to practise any sort of strategy. There wasnot a boy in the crowd that my boy went with who would have been allowedto hook into a circus by his parents; yet hooking in was an ideal thatwas cherished among them, that was talked of, and that was evensometimes attempted, though not often. Once, when a fellow really hookedin, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid, one of the fellows couldnot stand it. He asked him just how and where he got in, and then hewent to the door, and got back his money from the doorkeeper upon theplea that he did not feel well; and in five or ten minutes he was backamong the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur as would be hard todescribe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he really was--a littlelying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so, though he had onsome other point of personal honesty the most fantastic scruples. 

The boys liked to be at the circus early so as to make sure of the grandentry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled round onhorseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. Thefellows were united in this, but upon other matters feelingvaried--some liked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; somebareback-riding; some the feats of tossing knives and balls and catchingthem. There never was more than one ring in those days; and you were nottempted to break your neck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying towatch all the things that went on at once in two or three rings. 

The boys did not miss the smallest feats of any performance, and theyenjoyed them every one, not equally, but fully. They had theirpreferences, of course, as I have hinted; and one of the most popularacts was that where a horse has been trained to misbehave, so thatnobody can mount him; and after the actors have tried him, thering-master turns to the audience, and asks if some gentleman among themwants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsy country-jake is seenmaking his way down from one of the top seats toward the ring. He canhardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown has to help him across thering-board, and even then he trips and rolls over on the saw-dust, andhas to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him up to the horse, hefalls against it; and the little fellows think he will certainly getkilled. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shut up and watchout. The ring-master and the clown manage to get the country-jake on tothe broad platform on the horse's back, and then the ring-master crackshis whip, and the two supes who have been holding the horse's head letgo, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. The little fellowsare just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, he reels andtotters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out; and prettysoon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins to unbutton hislong gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws it into thering, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a short pipeinto his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes a stickthat the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishman justcome across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comes out aBritish soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comes off, andhe is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips, dancing ahorn-pipe. 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 every-day clothes, and some with just overcoats on overtheir circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the bandstand 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 downward 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 fellow 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. 

[Illustration]

PASSING SHOWS

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 camels to getwhat good they could out of the scenes in which these hidden wonderswere dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they always cameforward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they had toendure 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 afterward. 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 theelephants tobacco, 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 poke themthrough the bars, or anything; and when you took your seat there wasnothing much till Herr Driesbach entered the lions' cage, and began tomake 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 bareback-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. 

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 wasalways hoped that some of the fiercest animals would get away and haveto be hunted down, and retaken after they had killed a lot of dogs. Ifthe elephants, some of them, had gone crazy, it would have beensomething, for then they would have roamed up and down the turnpikesmashing buggies and wagons, and had to be shot with the six-poundcannon that was 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. 

But the great reason of all was that you could not have an animal showof your own as you could a circus. You could not get the animals; and noboy living could act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant soas to look the 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. 

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

A great new experience which now came to the boy was the theatre, whichhe had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been atheatre in the Boy's Town, when a strolling company came up fromCincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty pork-house. But that wasa long time ago, and, though he had written a tragedy, all that the boyknew of a theatre was from a picture in a Sunday-school book where astage scene was given to show what kind of desperate amusements a personmight come to in middle life if he began by breaking the Sabbath in hisyouth. His brother had once been taken to a theatre in Pittsburg by oneof their river-going uncles, and he often told about it; but my boyformed no conception of the beautiful reality from his accounts of aburglar who jumped from a roof and was chased by a watchman with apistol up and down a street with houses painted on a curtain. 

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, afterward 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 piratewho fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and twodown--click-click, click-click--and died all over the deck of the pirateship in the opening piece. This was called the _Beacon of Death_, andthe scene represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lanterndangling from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to theirdoom. Afterward the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap ofthe dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the piratecaptain appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, "Let us gobelow and get some brandy!" the boy would have bartered all his hopesof bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longed to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender yearsat the theatre that he afterward came to be very tired of it, andavoided the plays 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 afterward 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 mustache--a black mustache--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 of villany, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. 

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

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 whilehe was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savageusages of the boy's world about him, he was dwelling in a whollydifferent world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could nottell now these wonders any more than he could have told them then; butit was a world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would havebeen more ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was all vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and that filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloofwith their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could notlure him 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 themafterward. 

First of them was Goldsmith's _History of Greece_, which made him anAthenian of Pericles' time, and Goldsmith's _History of Rome_, whichnaturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in slayingtyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of Domitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had read thesebooks, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father thought fitto put into his hands _The Travels of Captain Ashe in North America_, toencourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful reading; but thiswas a failure. The captain's travels were printed with long esses, andthe boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons. The fancynourished upon

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

starved amid 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 he failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy cameinto possession of a priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on_Greek and Roman Mythology_ which I have mentioned, and which he mustliterally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems tohave survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it;his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and theboy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in theback part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared inmany transfigurations, 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 oddly enough these wonderful talesmade no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedlyinferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wroteit; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblindsort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literaryvision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his_Greek and Roman Mythology_; and then suddenly, one day, as happens inchildhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as ifby magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it wasgone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was tillthirty years afterward, when he picked up from a friend's library-tablea copy of _Gesta Romanorum_, and recognized in this collection of oldmonkish legends the long-missing treasure of his boyhood. 

These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of constructionor character, without spirituality in their crude materialization, whichwere read aloud in the refectories of mediæval cloisters while the monkssat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the boy that governed hislife. He conformed his conduct to the principles and maxims whichactuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these dry-as-dust tales;he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about Roman emperors thatnever were, in an empire that never was; and, though they tormented himby putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the place of that heknew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break from theirinfluence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to happen to himas things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or prophecy; andat every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for himself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was walking in analley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that had probablyfallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in hissimple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he picked itup there came into his mind the words, "He who picketh up this cappicketh up a fortune, " and he could hardly wait for Monday to come andlet him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring prosperityin reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected this totake; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all courage; histongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a syllableof the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the cap on thecounter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it in his hand. "What's this?" he said. "Why, this is ours, " and he tossed the cap intoa loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk out, cut to theheart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel disappointment andmortification that it was rather a relief to have his brother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, "He who picketh up this cappicketh up a fortune, " and then split into a jeering laugh. At least hecould fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him; and he couldthrow quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour printers whenthe story spread to them, and one of them would begin, "He whopicketh--"

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 smallcopper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion tohim. Afterward 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. 

V

THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN

THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN

My boy was twelve years old, and was already a swift compositor, thoughhe was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the casein setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. But what he lacked instature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "TheOld Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt inliterature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and theprinting-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, hisuniversity. He could no more remember learning to set type than he couldremember learning to read; and in after-life he could not come withinsmell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing-officewithout that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds toany memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancycame back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on thenew paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the familywere going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys thathe was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave himdistinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that asthe time drew near it could be sorrow. But when it came at last, and hewas to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathlyhomesick. 

The parting days were days of gloom; the parting was an anguish ofbitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the fact that they were going allthe way to the new place in a canal-boat, which his father chartered forthe trip. My boy and his brother had once gone to Cincinnati in acanal-boat, with a friendly captain of their acquaintance, and, thoughthey were both put to sleep in a berth so narrow that when they turnedthey fell out on the floor, the glory of the adventure remained withhim, and he could have thought of nothing more delightful than suchanother voyage. The household goods were piled up in the middle of theboat, and the family had a cabin forward, which seemed immense to thechildren. They played in it and ran races up and down the longcanal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes put theirchairs and sat to admire the scenery. 

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. 

After a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. It could onlyhave been three or four months after he had left it, but it alreadyseemed a very long time; and he figured himself returning as stageheroes do to the scenes of their childhood, after an absence of somefifteen years. He fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, theywould find him somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with thelight accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay withhis grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was veryfond of her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house. He must have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept norecord of the fact, and afterward he knew only of having arrived, and ofsearching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may havebeen at school; at any rate, he found very few of them; and with them hewas certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him witha kind 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;only it ached. When he went up from his grandmother's to look at theFaulkner house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could notbear the sight of it. There were other people living in it; strangevoices sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from thewindows. 

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; and theystood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had on hisbest clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy's Town boys with thefull splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid, buthis 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 toward 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 amid 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