ircus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them
dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at
the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the
Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the state, on their way
to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have known
that these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most of
fathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once there
the Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out of
heaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets and
moccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squatting
in groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures.
The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys had
bows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed the
Indians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went up
to the court-house yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows.
It almost made the boys crazy.

Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, or
some game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents and
bits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indians
would all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit it
had the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back the
arrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they lived
through it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; he
could only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom he
revered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would have
been too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three of
the Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy's Town boys said they were
girls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of six
or seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men were
not a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did not
enter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sages
who shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and the
boys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of a
world where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and ranging
the woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alone
make men of boys. They wishe