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 the
boy whose father had the turning-shop on the Hydraulic learned to turn
their 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 the
wire peg yourself. I believe he was the same boy who wanted to be a
pirate 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 outspin
anything you could get in a store. The boys usually chose a firm, smooth
piece 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, and
the rest waited till it began to go to sleep, that is, to settle in one
place, and straighten up and spin silently, as if standing still. Then
any fellow had a right to peg at it with his top, and if he hit it, he
won it; and if he split it, as sometimes happened, the fellow that owned
it had to give him a top. The boys came with their pockets bulged out
with tops, but before long they had to go for more tops to that boy who
could turn them. From this it was but another step to go to the shop
with him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process of
time the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a better
place to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would have
given whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloing
too 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. Some
few of the boys had humming-tops; but though these pleased by their
noise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against the
good old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind up
with a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flat
button held between your fore finger and middle finger. Some of the boys
had a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could control
its course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of a
base-ball.
I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows who
had been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselves
playing something else. Kites came in just about the time of the
greatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not have
lasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, and
kept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, and
I suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth of
July. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, and
house kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carried
over the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did not
fly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it was
held in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the smallest
boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in the form
of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on the
Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a kind
of girl. The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind
best, and flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up,
was the house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in
the form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the
base than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of all
these kites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a string
carried taut from stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to hold
it; sometimes the sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing,
and sometimes they were mortised into one another; but this was apt to
weaken them. The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paper
was cut an inch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over the
string. Most of the boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; but
my boy and his brother could usually get paste from the printing-office;
and when they could not they would make it by mixing flour and water
cream-thick, and slowly boiling it. That was a paste that would hold
till the cows came home, 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 the kitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (and
you nearly always were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands and
tail-bands; that is, with strings carried from stick to stick over the
face and at the bottom, 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 kite would not balance, but would be always pitching and
darting. Then the tail had to be of just the right weight; if it was too
heavy the kite kept 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 the ground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists of
paper across a string a foot apart, till there were enough to balance
the kite; but this sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the best
tail was made of a long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft of
dog-fennel at the end. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just the
right weight was got; and when this was done, after several experimental
tests, the kite was laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, or
on a long stretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tail
stretched carefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. You
unwound a great length of twine, running backward, and letting the twine
slip swiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then you
seized the ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that all
was right, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from the
ground, and, swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into the
air, with its long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swung
free. If there was not much surface wind you might have to run a little
way, but as soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straightened
itself, pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave it
more and more twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ran
through your hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, at
such a height that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight in
the distance.
If it was a hot July day the sky would be full of kites, and the Commons
would be dotted over with boys holding them, or setting them up, or
winding them in, and all talking and screaming at the tops of their
voices under the roasting sun. One might think that kite-flying, at
least, 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 the
boys got their kites up, they drew together for company and for an
easier comparison of their merits. It was only a mean boy who would try
to 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 and
laughed. Now and then the tail of a kite would part midway, and then the
kite would begin to dart violently from side to side, and then to whirl
round and round in swifter and narrower circles till it dashed itself to
the ground. Sometimes the kite-string would break, and the kite would
waver 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 came
down, perhaps a mile or more away. It usually came down in a tree, and
they had to climb for it; but sometimes it lodged so high that no one
could reach it; and then it was slowly beaten and washed away in the
winds and rains, and its long tail left streaming all winter from the
naked bough where it had caught. It was so good for kites on the
Commons, because there were no trees there, and not even fences, but a
vast open stretch of level grass, which the cows and geese kept cropped
to the earth; and for the most part the boys had no trouble with their
kites there. Some of them had paper fringe pasted round the edges of
their kites; this made a fine rattling as the kite rose, and when the
kite stood, at the end of its string, you could hear the humming if you
put 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, so
as to slip over the string, which would be pulled level long enough to
give the messenger a good start, and then released, when the wind would
catch the little circle, and drive it up the long curving incline till
it reached the kite.
[Illustration: KITE TIME.]
It was thought a great thing in a kite to pull, and it was a favor to
another boy to let him take hold of your string and feel how your kite
pulled. If you wanted to play mumble-the-peg, or anything, while your
kite was up, you tied it to a stake in the ground, or gave it to some
other fellow to hold; there were always lots of fellows eager to hold
it. 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 certain
just how strong a kite had to be to take a small boy up, and nobody had
ever seen a kite do it, but everybody expected to see it.
IX.
CIRCUSES AND SHOWS.
WHAT every boy expected to do, some time or other, was to run off. He
expected to do this because the scheme offered an unlimited field to the
imagination, and because its fulfilment would give him the highest
distinction among the other fellows. To run off was held to be the only
way for a boy to right himself against the wrongs and hardships of a
boy's life. As far as the Boy's Town was concerned, no boy had anything
to complain of; the boys had the best time in the world there, and in a
manner they knew it. But there were certain things that they felt no boy
ought to stand, and these things were sometimes put upon them at school,
but usually at home. In fact, nearly all the things that a fellow
intended to run off for were done to him by those who ought to have been
the kindest to him. Some boys' mothers had the habit of making them stop
and do something for them just when they were going away with the
fellows. Others would not let them go in swimming as often as they
wanted, and, if they saw them with their shirts on wrong side out, would
not believe that they could get turned in climbing a fence. Others made
them split kindling and carry in wood, and even saw wood. None of these
things, in a simple form, was enough to make a boy run off, but they
prepared his mind for it, and when complicated with whipping they were
just cause for it. Weeding the garden, though, was a thing that almost,
in itself, was enough to make a fellow run off.
Not many of the boys really had to saw wood, though a good many of the
fellows' fathers had saws and bucks in their wood-sheds. There were
public sawyers who did most of the wood-sawing; and they came up with
their bucks on their shoulders, and asked for the job almost as soon as
the wood was unloaded before your door. The most popular one with the
boys was a poor half-wit known among them as Morn; and he was a favorite
with them because he had fits, and because, when he had a fit, he would
seem to fly all over the woodpile. The boys would leave anything to see
Morn in a fit, and he always had a large crowd round him as soon as the
cry went out that he was beginning to have one. They watched the hapless
creature with grave, unpitying, yet not unfriendly interest, too
ignorant of the dark ills of life to know how deeply tragic was the
spectacle that entertained them, and how awfully present in Morn's
contortions was the mystery of God's ways with his children, some of
whom he gives to happiness and some to misery. When Morn began to pick
himself weakly up, with eyes of pathetic bewilderment, they helped him
find his cap, and tried to engage him in conversation, for the pleasure
of seeing him twist his mouth when he said, of a famous town drunkard
whom he admired, "He's a strong man; he eats liquor." It was probably
poor Morn's ambition to eat liquor himself, and the boys who followed
that drunkard about to plague him had a vague respect for his lamentable
appetite.
None of the boys ever did run off, except the son of one of the
preachers. He was a big boy, whom my boy remotely heard of, but never
saw, for he lived in another part of the town; but his adventure was
known to all the boys, and his heroism rated high among them. It took
nothing from this, in their eyes, that he was found, homesick and crying
in Cincinnati, and was glad to come back--the great fact was that he had
run off; nothing could change or annul that. If he had made any mistake,
it was in not running off with a circus, for that was the true way of
running off. Then, if you were ever seen away from home, you were seen
tumbling through a hoop and alighting on the crupper of a barebacked
piebald, and if you ever came home you came home in a gilded chariot,
and you flashed upon the domestic circle in flesh-colored tights and
spangled breech-cloth. As soon as the circus-bills began to be put up
you began to hear that certain boys were going to run off with that
circus, and the morning after it left town you heard they had gone, but
they always turned up at school just the same. It was believed that the
circus-men would take any boy who wanted to go with them, and would
fight off his friends if they tried to get him away.
The boys made a very careful study of the circus-bills, and afterwards,
when the circus came, they held the performance to a strict account for
any difference between the feats and their representation. For a
fortnight beforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of the
circus into a fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question with
a great many whether 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 Spanish _real_, then a commoner coin than the American dime in the
West; and every boy, for that time only, wished to be little enough to
look young enough to go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a free
ticket for every member of their families; and my boy was sure of going
to the circus from the first rumor of its coming. But he was none the
less deeply thrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on the
morning of the great day, to go out and meet the circus procession
beyond the corporation line.
I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory of
such a sight. Once there were two chariots--one held the band in
red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the
other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast
mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in
the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this
splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it in
rapture 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 two
by two in their circus-dresses after the chariots, and looking some
haughty and contemptuous, and others quiet and even bored, as if it were
nothing to be part of such a procession. The boys tried to make them out
by the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the bare-back
rider, and which was O'Dale, the champion tumbler; which was the
India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown. Covered with
dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours' run beside the
procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived with it
on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and the
ring was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headed tent-stakes,
and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of the pavilion which
they were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys were not allowed to
come anywhere near, except three or four who got leave to fetch water
from a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paid with
half-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word with them
as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money to go
in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of coming
close to the circus-men. They stood about in twos and threes, and lay
upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was better
than a sawdust ring; there were different opinions. They came as near
the wagons as they dared, and looked at the circus-horses munching hay
from the tail-boards, just like common horses. The wagons were left
standing outside of the tent; but when it was up, the horses were taken
into the dressing-room, and then the boys, with many a backward look at
the wide spread of canvas, and the flags and streamers floating over it
from the centre-pole (the centre-pole was revered almost like a
distinguished personage), ran home to dinner so as to get back good and
early, and be among the first to go in. All round, before the circus
doors were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting people
to come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, and
there were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried,
"Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up,
roll up, tumble up, any way to get up!" The boys thought this brilliant
drolling, but they had no time to listen after the doors were open, and
they had no money to spend on side-shows or dainties, anyway. Inside the
tent, they found it dark and cool, and their hearts thumped in their
throats with the wild joy of being there; they recognized one another
with amaze, as if they had not met 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 called the farmer-folk, and seeing how green
they looked, and how some of them tried to act smart with the circus-men
that came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to see
whether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in. The
boys held it to be a high and creditable thing to hook into a show of
any kind, but hooking into a circus was something that a fellow ought to
be held in special honor for doing. He ran great risks, and if he
escaped the vigilance of the massive circus-man who patrolled the
outside of the tent with a cowhide and 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 govern
them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off
as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and
other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they
come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and
the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest
Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect
of the Boy's Town. The standard of honor there was, in a certain way,
very high among the boys; they would have despised a thief as he
deserved, and I cannot remember one of them who might not have been
safely trusted. None of them would have taken an apple out of a
market-wagon, or stolen a melon from a farmer who came to town with it;
but they would all have thought it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard
or hook a watermelon out of a patch. This would have been a foray into
the enemy's country, and the fruit of the adventure would have been the
same as the plunder of a city, or the capture of a vessel belonging to
him on the high seas. In the 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 have been proud to hook into the circus-man's show,
and the other fellows would have been proud of his exploit, too, as
something that did honor to them all. As a person who enclosed bounds
and forbade trespass, the circus-man constituted himself the enemy of
every boy who respected himself, and challenged him to practise any sort
of strategy. There was not a boy in the crowd that my boy went with who
would have been allowed to hook into a circus by his parents; yet
hooking in was an ideal that was cherished among them, that was talked
of, and that was even sometimes attempted, though not often. Once, when
a fellow really hooked in, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid,
one of the fellows could not stand it. He asked him just how and where
he got in, and then he went to the door, and got back his money from the
doorkeeper upon the plea that he did not feel well; and in five or ten
minutes he was back among the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur as
would be hard to describe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he really
was--a little lying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so,
though he had on some 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
grand entry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled round
on horseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. The
fellows were united in this, but upon other matters feeling varied--some
liked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; some bare-back riding; some
the feats of tossing knives and balls and catching them. There never was
more than one ring in those days; and you were not tempted to break your
neck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying to watch 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 they enjoyed them every one, not
equally, but fully. They had their preferences, of course, as I have
hinted; and one of the most popular acts was that where a horse has been
trained to misbehave, so that nobody can mount him; and after the actors
have tried him, the ring-master turns to the audience, and asks if some
gentleman among them wants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsy
country-jake is seen making his way down from one of the top-seats
towards the ring. He can hardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown has
to help him across the ring-board, and even then he trips and rolls over
on the sawdust, and has to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him up
to the horse, he falls against it; and the little fellows think he will
certainly get killed. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shut
up and watch out. The ring-master and the clown manage to get the
country-jake on to the broad platform on the horse's back, and then the
ring-master cracks his whip, and the two supes who have been holding the
horse's head let go, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. The
little fellows are just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, he
reels and totters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out;
and pretty soon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins to
unbutton his long gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws it
into the ring, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a short
pipe into his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes a
stick that the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishman
just come across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comes
out a British soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comes
off, and he is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips dancing a
hornpipe. Suddenly away flash wig and beard and false-face, the
pantaloons are stripped off with the same movement, the actor stoops for
the reins lying on the horse's neck, and James Rivers, the greatest
three-horse rider in the world nimbly capers on the broad pad, and
kisses his hand to the shouting and cheering spectators as he dashes
from the ring past the braying and bellowing brass-band into the
dressing-room!