end of nothingness that
awaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them;
he meant to raise silk-worms; he prepared to take the contract of
clearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out with
gunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for making
money, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up into
stove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The only
trouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boys
had a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they would
rather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a good
many other schemes for getting rich, that failed; and he wanted to go to
California and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He really
did save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after a
long rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, who
had the firebells rung. The fire companies came rushing to the rescue,
but as they could not put the Basin out with their engines, they all got
shovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowed
the street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The water
stood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy's house, and the yard was
flooded so that the boys made rafts and navigated it for a whole day. My
boy's brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots of fellows
fell off the rafts.

He belonged to a military company of big boys that had real wooden guns,
such as the little boys never could get, and silk oil-cloth caps, and
nankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down the
legs; and once they marched out to a boy's that had a father that had a
farm, and he gave them all a free dinner in an arbor before the house;
bread and butter, and apple-butter, and molasses and pound cake, and
peaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about the
Mexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got a
farmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy place
there was near a piece of woods, where a good many cows were pastured.
They took the pieces of sod, and built them up into the walls of a fort
about fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than their
heads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they could
not wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the walls
only breast hi