k and
cool, and their hearts thumped in their throats with the wild joy of
being there; they recognized one another with amaze, as if they had not
met for years, and the excitement kept growing as other fellows came in.
It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys called
the farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and now some of them
tried to act smart with the circus men that came round with oranges to
sell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they were
going to hook in really got in. The boys held it to be a high and
creditable thing to hook into a show of any kind, but hooking into a
circus was something that a fellow ought to be held in special honor for
doing. He ran great risks, and if he escaped the vigilance of the
massive circus man who patrolled the outside of the tent with a cow-hide
and a bulldog, perhaps he merited the fame he was sure to win.

I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that govern
them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off
as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and
other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they
come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and
the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest
Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect
of the Boy's Town.

The standard of honor there was, in a certain way, very high among the
boys; they would have despised a thief as he deserved, and I cannot
remember one of them who might not have been safely trusted. None of
them would have taken an apple out of a market-wagon, or stolen a melon
from a farmer who came to town with it; but they would all have thought
it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard or hook a watermelon out of a
patch. This would have been a foray into the enemy's country, and the
fruit of the adventure would have been the same as the plunder of a
city, or the capture of a vessel belonging to him on the high seas. In
the same way, if one of the boys had seen a circus man drop a quarter,
he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only have
been proud to hook into the circus man's show, and the other fellows
would have been proud of his exploit, too, as something that did honor
to them all. As a person who enclosed bounds and forbade trespass, the
circus man constituted himself the enemy of