hey said that he
just made the rat up.

He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Baker
that 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 it
might have been the kind of rat that people see when they have been
drinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he had
signed the temperance pledge.

But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonard
standing safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular election
cheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They all
agreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to his
mother, for he had saved Jim's life, and he ought to have the credit of
it.

Before this, and while everybody supposed that Jim Leonard would surely
be drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother's cabin to
prepare her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, and
she 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, and
dropped her pipe on the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw her
check 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 got
over comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all for
the best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim's
shoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them.

Jim's mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw that
Jim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that made
him 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 a
decent bed in the house!" and then she started to come toward Jim
Leonard.

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 a
town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he
seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle
of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most
things.... 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