though he still regarded the Whig politicians as chief among
the great ones, if not the good ones, of the earth. When he passed one
of them on the street, he held his breath for awe till he got by, which
was not always so very soon, for sometimes a Whig statesman wanted the
whole sidewalk to himself, and it was hard to get by him. There were
other people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these were
the professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, if
not corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four of
them, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deep
interest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. I do not
think any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavish
lives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, and
plagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them.
That was because the boys had not the experience to enable them to think
rightly, or to think at all about such things, or to know what images of
perdition they had before their eyes; and when they followed them and
teased them, they did not know they were joining like fiends in the
torment of lost souls. Some of the town-drunkards were the outcasts of
good homes, which they had desolated, and some had merely destroyed in
themselves that hope of any home which is the light of heaven in every
human heart; but from time to time a good man held out a helping hand to
one of them, and gave him the shelter of his roof, and tried to reclaim
him. Then the boys saw him going about the streets, pale and tremulous,
in a second-hand suit of his benefactor's clothes, and fighting hard
against the tempter that beset him on every side in that town; and then
some day they saw him dead drunk in a fence corner; and they did not
understand how seven devils worse than the first had entered in the
place which had been swept and garnished for them.

Besides the town-drunkards there were other persons in whom the boys
were interested, like the two or three dandies, whom their splendor in
dress had given a public importance in a community of carelessly dressed
men. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of good
families, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believed
to be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale,
the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family.
Between these and t