no means
pass it off for a good joke on you; it was considered mean.

In the Boy's Town there was almost as much stone-throwing as there was
in Florence in the good old times. There was a great abundance of the
finest kind of pebbles, from the size of a robin's egg upward, smooth
and shapely, which the boys called rocks. They were always stoning
something, birds, or dogs, or mere inanimate marks, but most of the time
they were stoning one another. They came out of their houses, or
front-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly good
terms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day. They
stoned a boy who left a group singly, and it was lawful for him to throw
stones back at the rest, if the whim took him, when he got a little way
off. With all this stone-throwing, very little harm was done, though now
and then a stone took a boy on the skull, and raised a lump of its own
size. Then the other boys knew, by the roar of rage and pain he set up,
that he had been hit, and ran home and left him to his fate.

Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, and
conducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning the
fights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knew
how to box, and all the fellows intended to learn, but nobody ever did.
The fights sprang usually out of some trouble of the moment; but at
times they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physical
superiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the other
to knock it off. It took a great while to bring the champions to blows,
and I have known the mere preparatory insults of a fight of this kind to
wear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of the
spectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affair
fell through.

Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boy
went with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they would
have scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned to
play with one. Of course while they were very little they played with
girls; and after they began to be big boys, eleven or twelve years old,
they began to pay girls some attention; but for the rest they simply
left them out of the question, except at parties, when the games
obliged them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, it
was not good form for a boy to be greatly interested in the