Do you hear?"

The boys cheered lustily, and Billy Tompkins, completely whipped and
ashamed, slunk away.

That night no report of the fight went home. Fred Brent held the master
hand.

In life it is sometimes God and sometimes the devil that comes to the
aid of oppressed humanity. From the means, it is often hard to tell
whose handiwork are the results.

CHAPTER VII

Cynics and fools laugh at calf-love. Youth, which is wiser, treats it
more seriously. When the boy begins to think of a girl, instead of
girls, he displays the first budding signs of a real growing manhood.
The first passion may be but the enthusiasm of discovery. Sometimes it
is not. At times it dies, as fleeting enthusiasms do. Again it lives,
and becomes a blessing, a curse, or a memory. Who shall say that the
first half-sweet pang that strikes a boy's heart in the presence of the
dear first girl is any less strong, intoxicating, and real to him than
that which prompts him to take the full-grown woman to wife? With
factitious sincerity we quote, "The boy is father to the man," and then
refuse to believe that the qualities, emotions, and passions of the man
are inherited from this same boy,--are just the growth, the development,
of what was embryonic in him.

Nothing is more serious, more pleasant, and more diverting withal, than
a boy's brooding or exultation--one is the complement of the
other--over his first girl. As, to a great extent, a man is moulded by
the woman he marries, so to no less a degree is a boy's character turned
and shaped by the girl he adores. Either he descends to her level, or
she draws him up, unconsciously, perhaps, to her own plane. Girls are
missionaries who convert boys. Boys are mostly heathens. When a boy has
a girl, he remembers to put on his cuffs and collars, and he does n't
put his necktie into his pocket on the way to school.

In a boy's life, the having of a girl is the setting up of an ideal. It
is the new element, the higher something which abashes the unabashed,
and makes John, who caused Henry's nose to bleed, tremble when little
Mary stamps her foot. It is like an atheist's finding God, the sudden
recognition of a higher and purer force against which all that he knows
is powerless. Why does n't John bully Mary? It would be infinitely
easier than his former exploit with Henry. But he does n't. He blushes
in her presence, brings her the best apples, out of which heretofore he
has enjoined the boys n