was to rush over to
the river-bank, all the boys and girls together, and play with the
flutter-mills till the bell rang. The market-house was not far off, and
they went there sometimes when it was not market-day, and played among
the stalls; and once a girl caught her hand on a meat-hook. My boy had a
vision of her hanging from it; but this was probably one of those grisly
fancies that were always haunting him, and no fact at all. The bridge
was close by the market-house, but for some reason or no reason the
children never played in the bridge. Perhaps the toll-house man would
not let them; my boy stood in dread of the toll-house man; he seemed to
have such a severe way of taking the money from the teamsters.

Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boy
did not know what that meant; in his own mind he could not disentangle
the idea of bows from the idea of arrows; but he was in love with the
girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on
account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the
most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from
his ridiculous little heart. While he was still a boy of ten he heard
that she was married; and she must have been a great deal older than he.
In fact he was too small a boy when he went to the Academy to remember
how long he went there, and whether it was months or years; but probably
it was not more than a year. He stopped going there because the teacher
gave up the school to become a New Church minister; and as my boy's
father and mother were New Church people, there must have been some
intimacy between them and the teacher, which he did not know of. But he
only stood in awe, not terror, of him; and he was not surprised when he
met him many long years after, to find him a man peculiarly wise,
gentle, and kind. Between the young and the old there is a vast gulf,
seldom if ever bridged. The old can look backward over it, but they
cannot cross it, any more than the young, who can see no thither side.

The next school my boy went to was a district school, as they called a
public school in the Boy's Town. He did not begin going there without
something more than his usual fear and trembling; for he had heard free
schools and pay schools talked over among the boys, and sharply
distinguished: in a pay school the teacher had only such powers of
whipping as were given him by the parents, and they w