called him the
rogue that he was. But enough: polite boys or saucy boys, white boys or
black boys, smart boys or lazy boys, Caucasian boys or Mongol boys--all
are rascals."

"Shocking, shocking!" nervously tucking his frayed cravat-end out of
sight. "Surely, respected sir, you labor under a deplorable
hallucination. Why, pardon again, you seem to have not the slightest
confidence in boys, I admit, indeed, that boys, some of them at least,
are but too prone to one little foolish foible or other. But, what then,
respected sir, when, by natural laws, they finally outgrow such things,
and wholly?"

Having until now vented himself mostly in plaintive dissent of canine
whines and groans, the man with the brass-plate seemed beginning to
summon courage to a less timid encounter. But, upon his maiden essay,
was not very encouragingly handled, since the dialogue immediately
continued as follows:

"Boys outgrow what is amiss in them? From bad boys spring good men? Sir,
'the child is father of the man;' hence, as all boys are rascals, so are
all men. But, God bless me, you must know these things better than I;
keeping an intelligence office as you do; a business which must furnish
peculiar facilities for studying mankind. Come, come up here, sir;
confess you know these things pretty well, after all. Do you not know
that all men are rascals, and all boys, too?"

"Sir," replied the other, spite of his shocked feelings seeming to pluck
up some spirit, but not to an indiscreet degree, "Sir, heaven be
praised, I am far, very far from knowing what you say. True," he
thoughtfully continued, "with my associates, I keep an intelligence
office, and for ten years, come October, have, one way or other, been
concerned in that line; for no small period in the great city of
Cincinnati, too; and though, as you hint, within that long interval, I
must have had more or less favorable opportunity for studying
mankind--in a business way, scanning not only the faces, but ransacking
the lives of several thousands of human beings, male and female, of
various nations, both employers and employed, genteel and ungenteel,
educated and uneducated; yet--of course, I candidly admit, with some
random exceptions, I have, so far as my small observation goes, found
that mankind thus domestically viewed, confidentially viewed, I may say;
they, upon the whole--making some reasonable allowances for human
imperfection--present as pure a moral spectacle as the pure