he did
not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed those
boys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to their
fort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remained
upon another.

My boy's brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy to
go to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boy
who, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that was
the boy who came to learn the trade in their father's printing-office,
and who began an historical romance at the time my boy began his great
Moorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink, the
types, while my boy's brother worked the press, and all day long my boy,
from where he was setting type, could hear him telling the story of a
book he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was a
count, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawing
literary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heard
of. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a book
as the _Conquest of Granada_, or _Gesta Romanorum_; and for a time he
kept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterward they came
together on _Don Quixote_, but though my boy came to have quite a
passionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudge
against him for his knowledge of _Monte Cristo_. He was as great a
laugher as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so that
two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and fun. He
became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes but
steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a private
soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in many
battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, ever
after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till he
died not long ago at his post of duty--a true, generous, and lofty
soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem commoner
in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our millionaires
and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their nobly simple
lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word for word, deed
for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of Monte Cristo, or
any hero of romance; and so would the common story of any common life.
But we cannot tell these stories, somehow.

A FRIEND