-office
without that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds to
any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancy
came back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on the
new paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the family
were going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys that
he was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave him
distinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that as
the time drew near it could be sorrow. But when it came at last, and he
was to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathly
homesick.

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

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

The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting
the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his
standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not
realize at first how much he missed the Boy's Town and all the familiar
fellowships