qualities; if any boy had gathered flowers the other boys would have
laughed at him; though boys gather every kind of thing that they think
will be of the slightest use or profit. I do not believe they appreciate
the perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the most
noisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw a
crowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the details
of his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom with
indifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than the
loveliest form of leaf or blossom. Their senses have none of the
delicacy which they acquire in after-life.
They are not cruel, that is, they have no delight in giving pain, as a
general thing; but they do cruel things out of curiosity, to see how
their victims will act. Still, even in this way, I never saw many cruel
things done. If another boy gets hurt they laugh, because it is funny to
see him hop or hear him yell; but they do not laugh because they enjoy
his pain, though they do not pity him unless they think he is badly
hurt; then they are scared, and try to comfort him. To bait a hook they
tear an angle-worm into small pieces, or impale a grub without
flinching; they go to the slaughter-house and see beeves knocked in the
head without a tremor. They acquaint themselves, at any risk, with all
that is going on in the great strange world they have come into; and
they do not pick or choose daintily among the facts and objects they
encounter. To them there is neither foul nor fair, clean nor unclean.
They have not the least discomfort from being dirty or unkempt, and they
certainly find no pleasure in being washed and combed and clad in fresh
linen. They do not like to see other boys so; if a boy looking sleek and
smooth came among the boys that my boy went with in the Boy's Town, they
made it a reproach to him, and hastened to help him spoil his clothes
and his nice looks. Some of those boys had hands as hard as horn,
cracked open at the knuckles and in the palms, and the crevices
blackened with earth or grime; and they taught my boy to believe that he
was an inferior and unmanly person, almost of the nature of a cry-baby,
because his hands were not horn-like, and cracked open, and filled with
dirt.
He had comrades enough and went with everybody, but till he formed that
friendship with the queer fellow whom I have told of, he had no friend
among the boys; and I very much doubt whether small boys understand
friendship, or can feel it as they do afterwards, in its tenderness and
unselfishness. In fact they have no conception of generosity. They are
wasteful with what they do not want at the moment; but their instinct is
to get and not to give. In the Boy's Town, if a fellow appeared at his
gate with a piece of bread spread with apple-butter and sugar on top,
the other fellows flocked round him and tried to flatter him out of
bites of it, though they might be at that moment almost bursting with
surfeit. To get a bite was so much clear gain, and when they had
wheedled one from the owner of the bread, they took as large a bite as
their mouths could stretch to, and they had neither shame nor regret for
their behavior, but mocked his just resentment.
The instinct of getting, of hoarding, was the motive of all their
foraging; they had no other idea of property than the bounty of nature;
and this was well enough as far as it went, but their impulse was not to
share this bounty with others, but to keep it each for himself. They
hoarded nuts and acorns, and hips and haws, and then they wasted them;
and they hoarded other things merely from the greed of getting, and with
no possible expectation of advantage. It might be well enough to catch
bees in hollyhocks, and imprison them in underground cells with flowers
for them to make honey from; but why accumulate fire-flies and even
dor-bugs in small brick pens? Why heap together mussel-shells; and what
did a boy expect to do with all the marbles he won? You could trade
marbles for tops, but they were not money, like pins; and why were pins
money? Why did the boys instinctively choose them for their currency,
and pay everything with them? There were certain very rigid laws about
them, and a bent pin could not be passed among the boys any more than a
counterfeit coin among men. There were fixed prices; three pins would
buy a bite of apple; six pins would pay your way into a circus; and so
on. But where did these pins come from or go to; and what did the boys
expect to do with them all? No boy knew. From time to time several boys
got together and decided to keep store, and then other boys decided to
buy of them with pins; but there was no calculation in the scheme; and
though I have read of boys, especially in English books, who made a
profit out of their fellows, I never knew any boy who had enough
forecast to do it. They were too wildly improvident for anything of the
kind, and if they had any virtue at all it was scorn of the vice of
stinginess.
They were savages in this as in many other things, but noble savages;
and they were savages in such bravery as they showed. That is, they were
venturesome, but not courageous with the steadfast courage of civilized
men. They fought, and then ran; and they never fought except with some
real or fancied advantage. They were grave, like Indians, for the most
part; and they were noisy without being gay. They seldom laughed, except
at the pain or shame of some one; I think they had no other conception
of a joke, though they told what they thought were funny stories, mostly
about some Irishman just come across the sea, but without expecting any
one to laugh. In fact, life was a very serious affair with them. They
lived in a state of outlawry, in the midst of invisible terrors, and
they knew no rule but that of might.
I am afraid that _Harper's Young People_, or rather the mothers of
_Harper's Young People_, may think I am painting a very gloomy picture
of the natives of the Boy's Town; but I do not pretend that what I say
of the boys of forty years ago is true of boys nowadays, especially the
boys who read _Harper's Young People_. I understand that these boys
always like to go tidily dressed and to keep themselves neat; and that a
good many of them carry canes. They would rather go to school than fish,
or hunt, or swim, any day; and if one of their teachers were ever to
offer them a holiday, they would reject it by a vote of the whole
school. They never laugh at a fellow when he hurts himself or tears his
clothes. They are noble and self-sacrificing friends, and they carry out
all their undertakings. They often have very exciting adventures such as
my boy and his mates never had; they rescue one another from shipwreck
and Indians; and if ever they are caught in a burning building, or cast
away on a desolate island, they know just exactly what to do.
But, I am ashamed to say, it was all very different in the Boy's Town;
and I might as well make a clean breast of it while I am about it. The
fellows in that town were every one dreadfully lazy--that is, they never
wanted to do any thing they were set to do; but if they set themselves
to do anything, they would work themselves to death at it. In this alone
I understand that they differed by a whole world's difference from the
boys who read _Harper's Young People_. I am almost afraid to confess how
little moral strength most of those long-ago boys had. A fellow would be
very good at home, really and truly good, and as soon as he got out with
the other fellows he would yield to almost any temptation to mischief
that offered, and if none offered he would go and hunt one up, and would
never stop till he had found one, and kept at it till it overcame him.
The spirit of the boy's world is not wicked, but merely savage, as I
have often said in this book; it is the spirit of not knowing better.
That is, the prevailing spirit is so. Here and there a boy does know
better, but he is seldom a leader among boys; and usually he is ashamed
of knowing better, and rarely tries to do better than the rest. He would
like to please his father and mother, but he dreads the other boys and
what they will say; and so the light of home fades from his ignorant
soul, and leaves him in the outer darkness of the street. It may be that
it must be so; but it seems a great pity; and it seems somehow as if the
father and the mother might keep with him in some word, some thought,
and be there to help him against himself, whenever he is weak and
wavering. The trouble is that the father and mother are too often
children in their way, and little more fit to be the guide than he.
But while I am owning to a good deal that seems to me lamentably wrong
in the behavior of the Boy's Town boys, I ought to remember one or two
things to their credit. They had an ideal of honor, false enough as far
as resenting insult went, but true in some other things. They were
always respectful to women, and if a boy's mother ever appeared among
them, to interfere in behalf of her boy when they were abusing him, they
felt the indecorum, but they were careful not to let her feel it. They
would not have dreamed of uttering a rude or impudent word to her; they
obeyed her, and they were even eager to serve her, if she asked a favor
of them.
For the most part, also, they were truthful, and they only told lies
when they felt obliged to do so, as when they had been in swimming and
said they had not, or as when they wanted to get away from some of the
boys, or did not wish the whole crowd to know what they were doing. But
they were generally shamefaced in these lies; and the fellows who could
lie boldly and stick to it were few. In the abstract lying was held in
such contempt that if any boy said you were a liar you must strike him.
That was not to be borne for an instant, any more than if he had called
you a thief.
I never knew a boy who was even reputed to have stolen anything, among
all the boys, high and low, who met together and played in a perfect
social equality; and cheating in any game was despised. To break bounds,
to invade an orchard or garden, was an adventure which might be
permitted; but even this was uncommon, and most of the boys saw the
affair in the true light, and would not take part in it, though it was
considered fair to knock apples off a tree that hung over the fence; and
if you were out walnutting you might get over the fence in extreme
cases, and help yourself. If the owner of the orchard was supposed to be
stingy you might do it to plague him. But the standard of honesty was
chivalrously high among those boys; and I believe that if ever we have
the equality in this world which so many good men have hoped for, theft
will be unknown. Dishonesty was rare even among men in the Boy's Town,
because there was neither wealth nor poverty there, and all had enough
and few too much.
XIX.
THE TOWN ITSELF.
OF course I do not mean to tell what the town was as men knew it, but
only as it appeared to the boys who made use of its opportunities for
having fun. The civic centre was the court-house, with the county
buildings about it in the court-house yard; and the great thing in the
court-house was the town clock. It was more important in the boys'
esteem than even the wooden woman, who had a sword in one hand and a
pair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and the boys
believed that she would be as high as a house if she stood on the
ground. She was above the clock, which was so far up in the air, against
the summer sky which was always blue, that it made your neck ache to
look up at it; and the bell was so large that once when my boy was a
very little fellow, and was in the belfry with his brother, to see if
they could get some of the pigeons that nested there, and the clock
began to strike, it almost smote him dead with the terror of its sound,
and he felt his heart quiver with the vibration of the air between the
strokes. It seemed to him that he should never live to get down; and he
never knew how he did get down. He could remember being in the
court-house after that, one night when a wandering professor gave an
exhibition in the court-room, and showed the effects of laughing-gas on
such men and boys as were willing to breathe it. It was the same gas
that dentists now give when they draw teeth; but it was then used to
make people merry and truthful, to make them laugh and say just what
they thought. My boy was too young to know whether it did either; but he
was exactly the right age, when on another night there was a large
picture of Death on a Pale Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom of
his soul by its ghastliness. When he was much older, his father urged
him to go to the court-house and hear the great Corwin, whose Mexican
War speech he had learned so much of by heart, arguing a case; but the
boy was too bashful to go in when he got to the door, and came back and
reported that he was afraid they would make him swear. He was sometimes
in the court-house yard, at elections and celebrations; and once he came
from school at recess with some other boys and explored the region of
the jail. Two or three prisoners were at the window, and they talked to
the boys and joked; and the boys ran off again and played; and the
prisoners remained like unreal things in my boy's fancy. Perhaps if it
were not for this unreality which misery puts on for the happy when it
is out of sight, no one could be happy in a world where there is so much
misery.
The school was that first one which he went to, in the basement of a
church. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaning
in the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called so
because the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there told
him so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and a
Catholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubt
there were other churches; but he had nothing to do with them.
Besides his grandfather's drug and book store, there was another drug
store, and there were eight or ten dry-goods stores, where every spring
the boys were taken to be fitted with new straw hats; but the store that
they knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaint
old German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew's-harps.
The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbers
through the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glass
that glistened in the sun. After a while the building disappeared like a
scene shifted at the theatre, and it was probably torn down. Then the
boys found another toy store; but they considered the dealer mean; he
asked very high prices, and he said, when a boy hung back from buying a
thing that it was "a very superior article," and the boys had that for a
by-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper's boy when they wanted
to plague him. There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery there
were small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest cakes in the world, for a
cent apiece; at the Dutch bakery there were pretzels, with salt and
ashes sticking on them, that the Dutch boys liked; but the American boys
made fun of them, and the bread at the Dutch bakery was always sour.
There were four or five taverns where drink was always sold and
drunkards often to be seen; and there was one Dutch tavern, but the
Dutchmen generally went to the brewery for their beer, and drank it
there. The boys went to the brewery, to get yeast for their mothers; and
they liked to linger among the great heaps of malt, and the huge vats
wreathed in steam, and sending out a pleasant smell. The floors were
always wet, and the fat, pale Dutchmen, working about in the vapory air,
never spoke to the boys, who were afraid of them. They took a boy's
bottle and filled it with foaming yeast, and then took his cent, all in
a silence so oppressive that he scarcely dared to breathe. My boy
wondered where they kept the boy they were bringing up to drink beer;
but it would have been impossible to ask. The brewery overlooked the
river, and you could see the south side of the bridge from its back
windows, and that was very strange. It was just like the picture of the
bridge in "Howe's History of Ohio," and that made it seem like a bridge
in some far-off country.
There were two fire-engines in the Boy's Town; but there seemed to be
something always the matter with them, so that they would not work, if
there was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulled
them up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with them
against the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as good
as 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 of
the rope. My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he never
dared; and the foreman of the Neptune, which was the larger and feebler
of the engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyes
that he felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was a
storekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his black
trousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and a
brass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It did
not make any difference how close he was to the men, he shouted
everything through the trumpet; and when they manned the breaks and
began to pump, he roared at them, "Down on her, down on her, boys!" so
that you would have thought the Neptune could put out the world if it
was burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter from
the 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 that the Tremont could squirt farther, and
they had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by its
reticence in public. It was small and black, but the Neptune was large,
and painted of a gay color lit up with gilding that sent the blood
leaping through a boy's veins. The boys knew the Neptune was out of
order, but they were always expecting it would come right, and in the
meantime they felt that it was an honor to the town, and they followed
it as proudly back to the engine-house after one of its magnificent
failures as if it had been a magnificent success. The boys were always
making magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for the
Neptune.
[Illustration: "THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF."]
Before the Hydraulic was opened, the pork-houses were the chief public
attraction to the boys, and they haunted them, with a thrilling interest
in the mysteries of pork-packing which none of their sensibilities
revolted from. Afterwards, the cotton-mills, which were rather small
brick factories, though they looked so large to the boys, eclipsed the
pork-house in their regard. They were all wild to work in the mills at
first, and they thought it a hardship that their fathers would not let
them leave school and do it. Some few of the fellows that my boy knew
did get to work in the mills; and one of them got part of his finger
taken off in the machinery; it was thought a distinction among the
boys, and something like having been in war. My boy's brother was so
crazy to try mill-life that he was allowed to do so for a few weeks; but
a few weeks were enough of it, and pretty soon the feeling about the
mills all quieted down, and the boys contented themselves with their
flumes and their wheel-pits, and the head-gates that let the water in on
the wheels; sometimes you could find fish under the wheels when the
mills were not running. The mill-doors all had "No Admittance" painted
on them; and the mere sight of the forbidding words would have been
enough to keep my boy away, for he had a great awe of any sort of
authority; but once he went into the mill to see his brother; and
another time he and some other boys got into an empty mill, where they
found a painter on an upper floor painting a panorama of "Paradise
Lost." This masterpiece must have been several hundred feet long; the
boys disputed whether it would reach to the sawmill they could see from
the windows if it was stretched out; and my boy was surprised by the
effects which the painter got out of some strips of tinsel which he was
attaching to the scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone at different
points. The artist seemed satisfied himself with this simple means of
suggesting the gleam of infernal fires. He walked off to a distance to
get it in perspective, and the boys ventured so close to the paints
which he had standing about by the bucketful that it seemed as if he
must surely hollo at them. But he did not say anything or seem to
remember that they were there. They formed such a favorable opinion of
him and his art that they decided to have a panorama; but it never came
to anything. In the first place they could not get the paints, let
alone the muslin.
Besides the bridge, the school-houses, the court-house and jail, the
port-houses and the mills, there was only one other public edifice in
their town that concerned the boys, or that they could use in
accomplishing the objects of their life, and this was the hall that was
built while my boy could remember its rise, for public amusements. It
was in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays,
for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed to
be devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled in
that science, which has reappeared in these days under the name of
hypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besides
teaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gave
nightly displays of its wonders. He mesmerized numbers of the boys, and
made them do or think whatever he said. He would give a boy a cane, and
then tell him it was a snake, and the boy would throw it away like
lightning. He would get a lot of boys, and mount them on chairs, and
then tell them that they were at a horse-race, and the boys would gallop
astride of their chairs round and round till he stopped them. Sometimes
he would scare them almost to death, with a thunder-storm that he said
was coming on; at other times he would make them go in swimming, on the
dusty floor, and they would swim all over it in their best clothes, and
would think they were in the river.
There were some people who did not believe in the professor, or the boys
either. One of these people was an officer of the army who was staying a
while in the Boy's Town, and perhaps had something to do with
recruiting troops for the Mexican War. He came to the lecture one
night, and remained with others who lingered after it was over to speak
with the professor. My boy was there with his father, and it seemed to
him that the officer smiled mockingly at the professor; angry words
passed, and then the officer struck out at the professor. In an instant
the professor put up both his fists; they flashed towards the officer's
forehead, and the officer tumbled backwards. The boy could hardly
believe it had happened. It seemed unreal, and of the dreamlike quality
that so many facts in a child's bewildered life are of.
There were very few places of amusement or entertainment in the Boy's
Town that were within a boy's reach. There were at least a dozen places
where a man could get whiskey, but only one where he could get
ice-cream, and the boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit this
resort. But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the outskirts of the
town, which my boy remembered visiting when he was a very little fellow,
with his brother. There were two large old mulberry-trees in this
garden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries,
and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all the
mulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a tame crow that my boy
understood could talk if it liked; but it only ran after him, and tried
to bite his legs. Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, or
puzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out among
bushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could find
your way out. My boy, though he had hold of his brother's hand, did not
expect to get out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he had
some notion that his end would be hastened by the tame crow. His first
visit to the pleasure-garden was his last; and it passed so wholly out
of his consciousness that he never knew what became of it any more than
if it had been taken up into the clouds.