town, and bashfully gasped out a
demand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. But
the boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not miss
them much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arising
from the woods and waters all about them that they did not need public
amusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. I
have tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the daily
arrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust if
I failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of the
old-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy's Town and Cincinnati. I
dare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it looked
as large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; and
they assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civic
pride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart.

My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the stage when he was so
young that it must have been when he first came to the Boy's Town. The
distance was twenty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It was
this furious speed which gave the child his earliest illusion of trees
and fences racing by while the stage seemed to stand still. Several
times after that he made the journey with his father, seeming to have
been gone a long age before he got back, and always so homesick that he
never had any appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinner
midway. When it started back, he thought it would never get off the city
pave and out from between its lines of houses into the free country. The
boys always called Cincinnati "The City." They supposed it was the only
city in the world.

[Illustration: "MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE."]

Of course there was a whole state of things in the Boy's Town that the
boys never knew of, or only knew by mistaken rumors and distorted
glimpses. They had little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religion
that was not wrong, and they only concerned themselves with persons and
places so far as they expected to make use of them. But as they could
make very little use of grown persons or public places, they kept away
from them, and the Boy's Town was, for the most part, an affair of
water-courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the houses,
and the alleys behind them.

Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and so