metimes took him into the woods, and rode him in
the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did
not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who
was learning the trade in his father's printing-office. This boy was
just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good
comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them,
and my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that
were not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books,
and they both began to write historical romances. My boy's romance was
founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again
and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors,
and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given
almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day
sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an
Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the meantime he did
what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods
with the other boy, who used to get his father's horse when he was not
using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild
grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river,
their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world that
could never come true.

XIII.

GUNS AND GUNNING.

ALL round the Boy's Town stood the forest, with the trees that must have
been well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from their
shadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets and
houses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where the
woods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not very
dense, and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more like
trees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or no
undergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket; and there were
sometimes grassy spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched their
pretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time,
it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grass
that took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness with an
image of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely my
conjecture, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall of
forest that enclosed the Boy's Town was