about swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind of
amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost
as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the
river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very
first things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there. He
learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew just
the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fond
of 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 ice
go a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it for skating as soon
as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them ever got drowned
there; though a boy would often start from one bank and go flying to the
other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin sheet sank and
swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the ice was not
thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have been on ice
which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all one bitter
afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first his feet
were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and at last he
did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he told one of
the big boys. "Why, your feet are frozen!" said the big boy, and he
dragged off my boy's skates, and the little one ran all the long mile
home, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet might
drop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl of
ice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed them
out; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: it
was intense, and there must have been a time afterward when he did not
use his feet.
His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smile
at nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty years
ago, 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. You
found an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies with
guttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhaps
curling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in an
acorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore that
skate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brass
acorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought your
skates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly about
while he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to bore
them 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 your
father let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you put
strings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off,
or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down on
one side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on the
ice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper's shavings, and could
sit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stones, between
your flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from the
frozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among the
embers.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
I sometimes wonder how much these have changed since my boy's time. Of
course they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from East
to West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown people
are apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of
the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten
usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the
same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are
binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys
between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing
his standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their world
without coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; he
obeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages from
whom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and
through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it
any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own
ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a
depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that
fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it
is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in
it. 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 and
customs that the boy's world can be studied.
The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through another
boy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself upon
his person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hope
to revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for that
time, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell the
teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outside
of the boys' world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor or
self-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would have
the 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 or
not, there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had to
stop.
Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a new
neighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason for
this, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other
means of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he became
subject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in the
last century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him into
their tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away from
a neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not have
to fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one of
them met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusions
with him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit of
whipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy's family left
the Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to see
him 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 a
Delaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights over
him. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not been
on new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. His
mother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for his
behavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over some
sugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhood
understood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The home
instruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was not
only wicked but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just as
wrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. But
all this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trials
and perplexities of life in the Boy's Town.
Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, and
conducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning the
fights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knew
how 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 at
times they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physical
superiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the other
to 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 to
wear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of the
spectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affair
fell through.
GIRLS
Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boy
went with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they would
have scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned to
play with one. Of course, while they were very little, they played with
girls; 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 simply
left them out of the question, except at parties, when the games obliged
them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, it was not
good form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he had to
conceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless he wanted
to be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were having fun
they did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard a boy
might play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sisters and
their friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such things were
not encouraged. On the other hand, a boy was bound to defend them
against anything that he thought slighting or insulting; and you did not
have to verify the fact that anything had been said or done; you merely
had 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; and
they would sometimes get him to go in and ask his mother for crullers or
sugar-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, something
like "E-oo-we, e-oo-we!" and threw stones at trees, or anything, till he
came out. If he did not come after a reasonable time, they knew he was
not there, or that his mother would not let him come. A fellow was kept
in that way, now and then. If a fellow's mother came to the door the
boys always ran.
The mother represented the family sovereignty; the father was seldom
seen, and he counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. It
was the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing or in
swimming, and she was held a good mother or not according as she
habitually said yes or no. There was no other standard of goodness for
mothers in the boy's world, and could be none; and a bad mother might be
outwitted 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 boy
took it hard if the other fellows made fun when their plan got him into
trouble at home. If a boy came out after some such experience with his
face wet, and his eyes red, and his lips swollen, of course you had to
laugh; 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 were
gone, or only came out of concealment to get some sort of shy lunch. If
the other fellows' mothers were there, he might be a little bolder, and
bring out cake from the second table. But he had to be pretty careful
how he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society. A fellow who
brushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came into the parlor when there
was company, was not well seen among the fellows; he was regarded in
some degree as a girl-boy; a boy who wished to stand well with other
boys kept in the woodshed, and only went in as far as the kitchen to get
things for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers who would
make a boy put on a collar when they had company, and disgrace him
before the world by making him stay round and help; they acted as if
they had no sense and no pity; but such mothers were rare.
Most mothers yielded to public opinion and let their boys leave the
house, and wear just what they always wore. I have told how little they
wore in summer. Of course in winter they had to put on more things. In
those days knickerbockers were unknown, and if a boy had appeared in
short pants and long stockings he would have been thought dressed like a
circus-actor. Boys wore long pantaloons, like men, as soon as they put
off skirts, and they wore jackets or roundabouts such as the English
boys still wear at Eton. When the cold weather came they had to put on
shoes and stockings, or rather long-legged boots, such as are seen now
only among lumbermen and teamsters in the country. Most of the fellows
had stoga boots, as heavy as iron and as hard; they were splendid to
skate in, they kept your ankles so stiff. Sometimes they greased them to
keep the water out; but they never blacked them except on Sunday, and
before Saturday they were as red as a rusty stovepipe. At night they
were 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 to
help you off with them, and then he pulled you all round the room. In
the morning they were dry, but just as hard as stone, and you had to
soap the heel of your woollen sock (which your grandmother had knitted
for 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 give
way, and you would have to stamp your foot in and kick the toe against
the mop-board. Then you gasped and limped round, with your feet like
fire, till you could get out and limber your boots up in some water
somewhere. 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 could
not paint the simplicity of things there truly without being
misunderstood in these days of great splendor and great squalor.
Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in town
might be worth twenty thousand dollars. There were distinctions among
the grown people, and no doubt there were the social cruelties which are
the modern expression of the savage spirit otherwise repressed by
civilization; but these were unknown among the boys. Savages they were,
but not that kind of savages. They valued a boy for his character and
prowess, and it did not matter in the least that he was ragged and
dirty. Their mothers might not allow him the run of their kitchens quite
so 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 of
them had not an overcoat; and underclothing was unknown among them.
When a boy had buttoned up his roundabout, and put on his mittens, and
tied his comforter round his neck and over his ears, he was warmly
dressed.
A BROTHER
My boy was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elder
brother of his; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have a
brother about four years older than yourself, I should say; and if your
temper is hot, and your disposition revengeful, and you are a vain and
ridiculous dreamer at the same time that you are eager to excel in feats
of strength and games of skill, and to do everything that the other
fellows do, and are ashamed to be better than the worst boy in the
crowd, your brother can be of the greatest use to you, with his larger
experience and wisdom. My boy's brother seemed to have an ideal of
usefulness, while my boy only had an ideal of glory--to wish to help
others, while my boy only wished to help himself. My boy would as soon
have thought of his father's doing a wrong thing as of his brother's
doing 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 he
wished to make shine before men in their fulfilment. His brother was
always doing for him and for the younger children; while my boy only did
for himself; he had a very gray mustache before he began to have any
conception of the fact that he was sent into the world to serve and to
suffer, as well as to rule and enjoy. But his brother seemed to know
this instinctively; he bore the yoke in his youth, patiently if not
willingly; he shared the anxieties as he parted the cares of his father
and mother. Yet he was a boy among boys, too; he loved to swim, to
skate, to fish, to forage, and passionately, above all, he loved to
hunt; but in everything he held himself in check, that he might hold the
younger boys in check; and my boy often repaid his conscientious
vigilance with hard words and hard names, such as embitter even the most
self-forgiving memories. He kept mechanically within certain laws, and
though in his rage he hurled every other name at his brother, he would
not call him a fool, because then he would be in danger of hell-fire. If
he had known just what Raca meant, he might have called him Raca, for he
was not so much afraid of the council; but, as it was, his brother
escaped that insult, and held through all a rein upon him, and governed
him through his scruples as well as his fears.
His brother was full of inventions and enterprises beyond most other
boys, and his undertakings came to the same end of nothingness that
awaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them;
he meant to raise silkworms; he prepared to take the contract of
clearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out with
gunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for making
money, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up into
stove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The only
trouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boys
had a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they would
rather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a good
many other schemes for getting rich that failed; and he wanted to go to
California and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He really
did save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after a
long rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, who
had 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 got
shovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowed
the street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The water
stood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy's house, and the yard was
flooded 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 of
fellows 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, and
nankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down the
legs; and once they marched out to a boy's that had a father that had a
farm, 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, and
peaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about the
Mexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got a
farmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy place
there 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 fort
about fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than their
heads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they could
not wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the walls
only breast high. There were going to be two parties: one to attack the
fort, and the other to defend it, and they were just going to throw
sods; but one boy had a real shot-gun, that he was to load up with
powder and fire off when the battle got to the worst, so as to have it
more like a battle. He thought it would be more like yet if he put in a
few shot, and he did it on his own hook. It was a splendid gun, but it
would not stand cocked long, and he was resting it on the wall of the
fort, ready to fire when the storming-party came on, throwing sods and
yelling and holloing; and all at once his gun went off, and a cow that
was grazing broadside to the fort gave a frightened bellow, and put up
her tail, and started for home. When they found out that the gun, if not
the boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took to their
heels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as that cow got
home, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she had been
shot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that he did
not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed those
boys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to their
fort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remained
upon another.
My boy's brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy to
go to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boy
who, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that was
the 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 great
Moorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink, the
types, 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 a
book he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was a
count, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawing
literary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heard
of. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a book
as the _Conquest of Granada_, or _Gesta Romanorum_; and for a time he
kept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterward they came
together on _Don Quixote_, but though my boy came to have quite a
passionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudge
against him for his knowledge of _Monte Cristo_. He was as great a
laugher as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so that
two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and fun. He
became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes but
steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a private
soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in many
battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, ever
after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till he
died not long ago at his post of duty--a true, generous, and lofty
soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem commoner
in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our millionaires
and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their nobly simple
lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word for word, deed
for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of Monte Cristo, or
any hero of romance; and so would the common story of any common life.
But we cannot tell these stories, somehow.
A FRIEND