Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom of
his soul by its ghastliness. When he was much older, his father urged
him to go to the court-house and hear the great Corwin, whose Mexican
War speech he had learned so much of by heart, arguing a case; but the
boy was too bashful to go in when he got to the door, and came back and
reported that he was afraid they would make him swear. He was sometimes
in the court-house yard, at elections and celebrations; and once he came
from school at recess with some other boys and explored the region of
the jail. Two or three prisoners were at the window, and they talked to
the boys and joked; and the boys ran off again and played; and the
prisoners remained like unreal things in my boy's fancy. Perhaps if it
were not for this unreality which misery puts on for the happy when it
is out of sight, no one could be happy in a world where there is so much
misery.

The school was that first one which he went to, in the basement of a
church. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaning
in the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called so
because the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there told
him so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and a
Catholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubt
there were other churches; but he had nothing to do with them.

Besides his grandfather's drug and book store, there was another drug
store, and there were eight or ten dry-goods stores, where every spring
the boys were taken to be fitted with new straw hats; but the store that
they knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaint
old German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew's-harps.
The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbers
through the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glass
that glistened in the sun. After a while the building disappeared like a
scene shifted at the theatre, and it was probably torn down. Then the
boys found another toy store; but they considered the dealer mean; he
asked very high prices, and he said, when a boy hung back from buying a
thing that it was "a very superior article," and the boys had that for a
by-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper's boy when they wanted
to plague him. There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery there
were small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest cakes in the world, f