still a prison to them. These
will not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope
that the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys of to-day will like
to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very
exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth
escapes; but it is the same thing--they have been used so often. I shall
try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and
it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own.
For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have
been almost anybody's boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in
general, as well as a boy in particular.

[Illustration: THE FIRST LOCK]

It seems to me that my Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a
boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as
blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another
river, called the Old River, which was the Miami's former channel, and
which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The
Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it
was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a
First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but
the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was
very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a
Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill-power through
the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the
Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran
under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams
and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they
had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice
of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then
there were the Commons: a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows
were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and
practised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.

EARLIEST MEMORIES

Some of my boy's memories reach a time earlier than his third year, and
relate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where his
mother's people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two or
three years the river rose and flooded the village; and his
gra