behaved like one of the family whenever
he got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, and
plundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him,
and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot.

Besides the peach-tree and the pet deer there was only one other thing
that my boy could remember, or seem to remember, of the few years before
he came to the Boy's Town. He is on the steamboat which is carrying the
family down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, on their way to the Boy's
Town, and he is kneeling on the window-seat in the ladies' cabin at the
stern of the boat, watching the rain fall into the swirling yellow river
and make the little men jump up from the water with its pelting drops.
He knows that the boat is standing still, and they are bringing off a
passenger to it in a yawl, as they used to do on the Western rivers when
they were hailed from some place where there was no wharf-boat. If they
were going down stream, they turned the boat and headed up the river,
and then with a great deal of scurrying about among the deck-hands, and
swearing among the mates, they sent the yawl ashore, and bustled the
passenger on board. In the case which my boy seemed to remember, the
passenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl, with his
crutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand; his family must be
watching him from the house. When the yawl comes alongside he tries to
step aboard the steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into the
yellow river, and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy, and it
is as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-drops. What
made my boy think when he grew a man that this was truly a memory was
that he remembered nothing else of the incident, nothing whatever after
the man went down in the water, though there must have been a great and
painful tumult, and a vain search for him. His drowning had exactly the
value in the child's mind that the jumping up of the little men had,
neither more nor less.

II.

HOME AND KINDRED.

AS the Boy's Town was, in one sense, merely a part of the boy, I think I
had better tell something about my boy's family first, and the
influences that formed his character, so that the reader can be a boy
with him there on the intimate terms which are the only terms of true
friendship. His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welsh
flannels, who had