utside of
the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten
usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the
same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are
binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys
between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing
his standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their world
without coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; he
obeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages from
whom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and
through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it
any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own
ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a
depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that
fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it
is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in
it. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly;
and in the mean while it is only in some of its milder manners and
customs that the boy's world can be studied.

The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through another
boy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself upon
his person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hope
to revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for that
time, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell the
teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outside
of the boys' world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor or
self-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would have
the right to mock you, to point at you, and call "E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!"
at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them or
not, there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had to
stop.

Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a new
neighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason for
this, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other
means of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he became
subject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in the
last century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him into
thei