rrels. They nailed a cleat
across the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them out
thin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. They
said they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to try
pretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and in
about three days they were all eaten up.

I dare say boys are very different nowadays, and do everything they say
they are going to do, and carry out all their undertakings. But in that
day they never carried out any of their undertakings. Perhaps they
undertook too much; but the failure was a part of the pleasure of
undertaking a great deal, and if they had not failed they would have
left nothing for the men to do; and a more disgusting thing than a world
full of idle men who had done everything there was to do while they were
boys, I cannot imagine. The fact is, boys _have_ to leave a little for
men to do, or else the race would go to ruin; and this almost makes me
half believe that perhaps even the boys of the present time may be
prevented from doing quite as much as they think they are going to do,
until they grow up. Even then they may not want to do it all, but only a
small part of it. I have noticed that men do not undertake half so many
things as boys do; and instead of wanting to be circus-actors and
Indians, and soldiers, and boat-drivers, and politicians and robbers,
and to run off, and go in swimming all the time, and out hunting and
walnutting, they keep to a very few things, and are glad then if they
can do them. It is very curious, but it is true; and I advise any boy
who doubts it to watch his father awhile.

XV.

MY BOY.

EVERY boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of
boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many
characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one
character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion
when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling
off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart,
at last, and then you have got down to nothing.

All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy's Town, in having each
an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but
that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or
not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while he
was joyfully sharing the wil