kept from the anxious eyes
at home, but even there you were expected not to say just what boys did
it.

They were by no means the worst boys who did such things, but only the
most thoughtless. Still, there was a public opinion in the Boy's Town
which ruled out certain tricks, and gave the boys who played them the
name of being "mean." One of these was boring a hole in the edge of your
school-desk to meet a shaft sunk from the top, which you filled with
slate-pencil dust. Then, if you were that kind of boy, you got some
little chap to put his eye close to the shaft, with the hope of seeing
Niagara Falls, and set your lips to the hole in the edge, and blew his
eye full of pencil-dust. This was mean; and it was also mean to get some
unsuspecting child to close the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb,
and look hard at you, while you showed him Germany. You did this by
pulling a string below the tube, and running a needle into his thumb. My
boy discovered Germany in this way long before he had any geographical
or political conception of it.

I do not know why, if these abominable cruelties were thought mean, it
was held lawful to cover a stone with dust and get a boy, not in the
secret, to kick the pile over with his bare foot. It was perfectly good
form, also, to get a boy, if you could, to shut his eyes, and then lead
him into a mud-puddle or a thicket of briers or nettles, or to fool him
in any heartless way, such as promising to pump easy when he put his
mouth to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with a
rush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from
his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because
the sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in
fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their
nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could
fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them
off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there were
other cases in which deceit was not allowable. For instance, if you
appeared on the playground with an apple, and all the boys came whooping
round, "You know _me_, Jimmy!" "You know your uncle!" "You know your
grandfather!" and you began to sell out bites at three pins for a
lady-bite and six pins for a hog-bite, and a boy bought a lady-bite and
then took a hog-bite, he was held in contempt, and could by