is not very
surprising, as there is nothing to keep in mind but a shirt, red
suspenders, and a pair of linen pantaloons dyed black to guard against
all contingencies. On Sunday you were more stylish: then you wore a fur
cap with a gold tassel, a blue roundabout with broad buttons, a scarlet
waistcoat, yellow shorts, white stockings, and buckled shoes, like any
other villager; and, besides, you very frequently had a fresh pink
behind your ear. But you were never at ease in all this glory; and I
like you rather better in your plainer garb, myself.

But now, friend gawk, go about your business; there's a good fellow. It
makes me nervous to tell your story to your face. You need not be
alarmed: I shall say nothing ill of you, though I do speak in the third
person.

The gawk not only had a real name, but a whole pedigree of them; in the
village he ought to have been called Bart's Bast's[1] boy, and he had
been christened Aloys. To please him, we shall stick to this last
designation. He will be glad of it, because, except his mother Maria
and a few of us children, hardly any one used it; all had the impudence
to say "Gawk." On this account he always preferred our society, even
after he was seventeen years old. In out-of-the-way places he would
play leap-frog with us, or let us chase him over the fields; and when
the gawk--I should say, when Aloys--was with us, we were secure against
the attacks of the children at the lime-pit; for the rising generation
of the village was torn by incessant feuds between two hostile parties.

Yet the boys of Aloys' own age were already beginning to feel their
social position. They congregated every evening, like the grown men,
and marched through the village whistling and singing, or stood at the
tavern-door of the Eagle, by the great wood-yard, and passed jokes with
the girls who went by. But the surest test of a big boy was the
tobacco-pipe. There they would stand with their speckled bone-pipe
bowls, of Ulm manufacture, tipped with silver, and hung with little
silver chains. They generally had them in their mouths unlit; but
occasionally one or the other would beg a live coal from the baker's
maid, and then they smoked with the most joyful faces they knew how to
put on, while their stomachs moaned within them.

Aloys had begun the practice too, but only in secret. One evening he
mustered up courage to mingle with his fellows, with the point of his
pipe peeping forth from his breast-pocket