aken,
and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the things
ashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keep
the pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instant
that it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted with
enough boys to have one.

The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting
the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his
standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not
realize at first how much he missed the Boy's Town and all the familiar
fellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he
began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided
love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and
wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at
the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long
mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of
every pleasure and excitement. There were many excitements, not the
least of which was the excitement of helping get out a tri-weekly and
then a daily newspaper, instead of the weekly that his father had
published in the Boy's Town. Then that dear friend of his brother and
himself, the apprentice who knew all about "Monte Cristo," came to work
with them and live with them again, and that was a great deal; but he
did not bring the Boy's Town with him; and when they each began to write
a new historical romance, the thought of the beloved scenes amidst which
they had planned their first was a pang that nothing could assuage.
During the summer the cholera came; the milkman, though naturally a
cheerful person, said that the people around where he lived were dying
off like flies; and the funerals, three and four, five and six, ten and
twelve a day, passed before the door; and all the brooding horror of the
pestilence sank deep into the boy's morbid soul. Then he fell sick of
the cholera himself; and, though it was a mild attack, he lay in the
Valley of the Shadow of Death while it lasted, and waited the worst with
such terror that when he kept asking her if he should get well, his
mother tried to reason with him, and to coax him out of his fear. Was he
afraid to die, she asked him, when he knew that heaven was so much
better, and he would be in the care of such love as never could come to
him on earth? He could only gasp back that