rs were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting people
to come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, and
there were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried,
"Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up,
roll up, tumble up, any way to get up!" The boys thought this brilliant
drolling, but they had no time to listen after the doors were open, and
they had no money to spend on side-shows or dainties, anyway. Inside the
tent, they found it dark and cool, and their hearts thumped in their
throats with the wild joy of being there; they recognized one another
with amaze, as if they had not met for years, and the excitement kept
growing, as other fellows came in. It was lots of fun, too, watching the
country-jakes, as the boys called the farmer-folk, and seeing how green
they looked, and how some of them tried to act smart with the circus-men
that came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to see
whether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in. The
boys held it to be a high and creditable thing to hook into a show of
any kind, but hooking into a circus was something that a fellow ought to
be held in special honor for doing. He ran great risks, and if he
escaped the vigilance of the massive circus-man who patrolled the
outside of the tent with a cowhide and a bulldog, perhaps he merited the
fame he was sure to win.

I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that govern
them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off
as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and
other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they
come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and
the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest
Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect
of the Boy's Town. The standard of honor there was, in a certain way,
very high among the boys; they would have despised a thief as he
deserved, and I cannot remember one of them who might not have been
safely trusted. None of them would have taken an apple out of a
market-wagon, or stolen a melon from a farmer who came to town with it;
but they would all have thought it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard
or hook a watermelon out of a patch. This would have been a foray into
the enemy's country, and the fruit of the a