any rate, my boy did not keep the family in
firewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-life
was a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must have
been laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he could
recall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit,
which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, as
people said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania German
kindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gay
colors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for any
other suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy's
advance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt it
commended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to be
even beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as he
passed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks and
four-o'clocks.

The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up
child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Like
the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar system
revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It has
no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; it
is for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, sensations,
for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law of
favor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make a
crueller idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his world
and having him for its chief concern. What remained to my boy of that
faint childish consciousness was the idea of some sort of supernal Being
who abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and made
winter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of a
family of which he was necessarily the centre, and of that far, vast,
unknown Town, lurking all round him, and existing on account of him if
not because of him. So, unless I manage to treat my Boy's Town as a part
of his own being, I shall not make others know it just as he knew it.

Some of his 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
grandmother's household