ing fun in one of those open canal-boats with the loose planks which
the over-night shower had set afloat, a fellow came up and said he had
got some tobacco that was the best kind to learn to chew with. Every boy
who expected to be anything in the world expected to chew tobacco; for
all the packet-drivers chewed; and it seemed to my boy that his father
and grandfather and uncles were about the only people who did not chew.
If they had only smoked, it would have been something, but they did not
even smoke; and the boy felt that he had a long arrears of manliness to
bring up, and that he should have to retrieve his family in spite of
itself from the shame of not using tobacco in any form. He knew that his
father abhorred it, but he had never been explicitly forbidden to smoke
or chew, for his father seldom forbade him anything explicitly, and he
gave himself such freedom of choice in the matter that when the boy with
the tobacco began to offer it around, he judged it right to take a chew
with the rest. The boy said it was a peculiar kind of tobacco, and was
known as molasses-tobacco because it was so sweet. The other boys did
not ask how he came to know its name, or where he got it; boys never ask
anything that it would be well for them to know; but they accepted his
theory, and his further statement that it was of a mildness singularly
adapted to learners, without misgiving. The boy was himself chewing
vigorously on a large quid, and launching the juice from his lips right
and left like a grown person; and my boy took as large a bite as his
benefactor bade him. He found it as sweet as he had been told it was,
and he acknowledged the aptness of its name of molasses-tobacco; it
seemed to him a golden opportunity to acquire a noble habit on easy
terms. He let the quid rest in his cheek as he had seen men do, when he
was not crushing it between his teeth, and for some moments he poled his
plank up and down the canal-boat with a sense of triumph that nothing
marred. Then, all of a sudden, he began to feel pale. The boat seemed
to be going round, and the sky wheeling overhead; the sun was dodging
about very strangely. Drops of sweat burst from the boy's forehead; he
let fall his pole, and said that he thought he would go home. The fellow
who gave him the tobacco began to laugh, and the other fellows to mock,
but my boy did not mind them. Somehow, he did not know how, he got out
of the canal-boat and started homeward; but at every