in the Boy's Town. A few
weeks' scuffling over the gravelly ground, or a single day's steady
sliding made them the subjects for half-soling, and then it was a
question of only a very little time.

A good many of the boys, though, wore their boots long after they were
worn out, and so they did with the rest of their clothes. I have tried
to give some notion of the general distribution of comfort which was
never riches in the Boy's Town; but I am afraid that I could not paint
the simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood in
these days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough,
but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twenty
thousand dollars. There were distinctions among the grown people, and no
doubt there were the social cruelties which are the modern expression of
the savage spirit otherwise repressed by civilization; but these were
unknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages.
They valued a boy for his character and prowess, and it did not matter
in the least that he was ragged and dirty. Their mothers might not allow
him the run of their kitchens quite so freely as some other boys, but
the boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how little
he was washed and dressed. The best of them had not an overcoat; and
underclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up his
roundabout, and put on his mittens, and tied his comforter round his
neck and over his ears, he was warmly dressed.

VIII.

PLAYS AND PASTIMES.

ABOUT the time fate cursed him with a granted prayer in those boots, my
boy was deep in the reading of a book about Grecian mythology which he
found perpetually fascinating; he read it over and over without ever
thinking of stopping merely because he had already been through it
twenty or thirty times. It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses,
demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their various
characters and exploits. But Apollo was his favorite, and I believe it
was with some hope of employing them in a personation of the god that he
coveted those red-topped sharp-toed calf-skin boots. He had a notion
that if he could get up a chariot by sawing down the sides of a
store-box for the body, and borrowing the hind-wheels of the baby's
willow wagon, and then, drawn by the family dog Tip at a mad gallop,
come suddenly whirling round the corner of the school-house, wearing
spa