usion, I say, that boy or man, the
human animal is, for most work-purposes, a losing animal. Can't be
trusted; less trustworthy than oxen; for conscientiousness a turn-spit
dog excels him. Hence these thousand new inventions--carding machines,
horseshoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines,
apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving
machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the
Lord-only-knows-what machines; all of which announce the era when that
refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried
by-gone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I
doubt not that a price will be put upon their peltries as upon the
knavish 'possums,' especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down
on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted
to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go out a boy-shooting."

"Oh, now! Lord, Lord, Lord!--But _our_ office, respected sir, conducted
as I ventured to observe----"

"No, sir," bristlingly settling his stubble chin in his coon-skins.
"Don't try to oil me; the herb-doctor tried that. My experience, carried
now through a course--worse than salivation--a course of five and thirty
boys, proves to me that boyhood is a natural state of rascality."

"Save us, save us!"

"Yes, sir, yes. My name is Pitch; I stick to what I say. I speak from
fifteen years' experience; five and thirty boys; American, Irish,
English, German, African, Mulatto; not to speak of that China boy sent
me by one who well knew my perplexities, from California; and that
Lascar boy from Bombay. Thug! I found him sucking the embryo life from
my spring eggs. All rascals, sir, every soul of them; Caucasian or
Mongol. Amazing the endless variety of rascality in human nature of the
juvenile sort. I remember that, having discharged, one after another,
twenty-nine boys--each, too, for some wholly unforeseen species of
viciousness peculiar to that one peculiar boy--I remember saying to
myself: Now, then, surely, I have got to the end of the list, wholly
exhausted it; I have only now to get me a boy, any boy different from
those twenty-nine preceding boys, and he infallibly shall be that
virtuous boy I have so long been seeking. But, bless me! this thirtieth
boy--by the way, having at the time long forsworn your intelligence
offices, I had him sent to me from the Commissioners of Emigration, all
the way from New Y