e boys who grow into the men who seem
commoner in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our
millionaires and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their
nobly simple lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word
for word, deed for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of
Monte Cristo, or any hero of romance; and so would the common story of
any common life; but we cannot tell these stories, somehow.

My boy knew nearly a hundred boys, more or less; but it is no use trying
to tell about them, for all boys are a good deal alike, and most of
these did not differ much from the rest. They were pretty good fellows;
that is to say, they never did half the mischief they intended to do,
and they had moments of intending to do right, or at least they thought
they did, and when they did wrong they said they did not intend to. But
my boy never had any particular friend among his schoolmates, though he
played and fought with them on intimate terms, and was a good comrade
with any boy that wanted to go in swimming or out hunting. His closest
friend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life,
and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than the
open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I dare say it was a
sense of his kinship with nature that took my boy with him, and rested
his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like a
piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or spinning in
him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or aim. He
lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a corn-field on
the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to find him
there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or three large
sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the boys had very
little to do with each other's houses, or, for that matter, with each
other's yards. His friend seldom entered my boy's gate, and never his
door; for with all the toleration his father felt for every manner of
human creature, he could not see what good the boy was to get from this
queer companion. It is certain that, he got no harm; for his companion
was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low as
the ground under foot, but morally he was as good as any boy in the
Boy's Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no impulses at all, in
fact, and of his own motion he never d