is
gate with a piece of bread spread with apple-butter and sugar on top,
the other fellows flocked round him and tried to flatter him out of
bites of it, though they might be at that moment almost bursting with
surfeit. To get a bite was so much clear gain, and when they had
wheedled one from the owner of the bread, they took as large a bite as
their mouths could stretch to, and they had neither shame nor regret for
their behavior, but mocked his just resentment.

The instinct of getting, of hoarding, was the motive of all their
foraging; they had no other idea of property than the bounty of nature;
and this was well enough as far as it went, but their impulse was not to
share this bounty with others, but to keep it each for himself. They
hoarded nuts and acorns, and hips and haws, and then they wasted them;
and they hoarded other things merely from the greed of getting, and with
no possible expectation of advantage. It might be well enough to catch
bees in hollyhocks, and imprison them in underground cells with flowers
for them to make honey from; but why accumulate fire-flies and even
dor-bugs in small brick pens? Why heap together mussel-shells; and what
did a boy expect to do with all the marbles he won? You could trade
marbles for tops, but they were not money, like pins; and why were pins
money? Why did the boys instinctively choose them for their currency,
and pay everything with them? There were certain very rigid laws about
them, and a bent pin could not be passed among the boys any more than a
counterfeit coin among men. There were fixed prices; three pins would
buy a bite of apple; six pins would pay your way into a circus; and so
on. But where did these pins come from or go to; and what did the boys
expect to do with them all? No boy knew. From time to time several boys
got together and decided to keep store, and then other boys decided to
buy of them with pins; but there was no calculation in the scheme; and
though I have read of boys, especially in English books, who made a
profit out of their fellows, I never knew any boy who had enough
forecast to do it. They were too wildly improvident for anything of the
kind, and if they had any virtue at all it was scorn of the vice of
stinginess.

They were savages in this as in many other things, but noble savages;
and they were savages in such bravery as they showed. That is, they were
venturesome, but not courageous with the steadfast courage of civilized
men.