tiger, or an elephant so as to look
the least like one.

Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; but
they were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on your
shirt-sleeves.

[Illustration: THE CIRCUS.]

X.

HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS.

[Illustration: "THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS."]

THE greatest day of all in the Boy's Town was Christmas. In that part of
the West the boys had never even heard of Thanksgiving, and their elders
knew of it only as a festival of far-off New England. Christmas was the
day that was kept in all churches and families, whether they were
Methodists or Episcopalians, Baptists or Universalists, Catholics or
Protestants; and among boys of whatever persuasion it was kept in a
fashion that I suppose may have survived from the early pioneer times,
when the means of expressing joy were few and primitive. On Christmas
eve, before the church-bells began to ring in the day, the boys began to
celebrate it with guns and pistols, with shooting-crackers and
torpedoes; and they never stopped as long as their ammunition lasted. A
fellow hardly ever had more than a bit to spend, and after he had paid
ten cents for a pack of crackers, he had only two cents and a half for
powder; and if he wanted his pleasure to last, he had to be careful. Of
course he wanted his pleasure to last, but he would rather have had no
pleasure at all than be careful, and most of the boys woke Christmas
morning empty-handed, unless they had burst their pistols the night
before; then they had a little powder left, and could go pretty well
into the forenoon if they could find some other boy who had shot off his
powder but had a whole pistol left. Lots of fellows' pistols got out
of order without bursting, and that saved powder; but generally a fellow
kept putting in bigger and bigger loads till his pistol blew to pieces.
There were all sorts of pistols; but the commonest was one that the boys
called a Christmas-crack; it was of brass, and when it burst the barrel
curled up like a dandelion stem when you split it and put it in water. A
Christmas-crack in that shape was a trophy; but of course the little
boys did not have pistols; they had to put up with shooting-crackers, or
maybe just torpedoes. Even then the big boys would get to fire them off
on one pretext or another. Some fellows would hold a cracker in their
hands till it exploded; nearly everybody had burned th