of the other side of it. The Basin
was bordered on either side near the end by pork-houses, where the pork
was cut up and packed, and then lay in long rows of barrels on the
banks, with other long rows of salt-barrels, and yet other long rows of
whiskey-barrels; cooper-shops, where the barrels were made, alternated
with the pork-houses. The boats brought the salt and carried away the
pork and whiskey; but the boy's practical knowledge of them was that
they lay there for the boys to dive off of when they went in swimming,
and to fish under. The water made a soft tuck-tucking at the sterns of
the boat, and you could catch sunfish, if you were the right kind of a
boy, or the wrong kind; the luck seemed to go a good deal with boys who
were not good for much else. Some of the boats were open their whole
length, with a little cabin at the stern, and these pretended to be for
carrying wood and stone, but really again were for the use of the boys
after a hard rain, when they held a good deal of water, and you could
pole yourself up and down on the loose planks in them. The boys formed
the notion at times that some of these boats were abandoned by their
owners, and they were apt to be surprised by their sudden return. A
feeling of transgression was mixed up with the joys of this kind of
navigation; perhaps some of the boys were forbidden it. No limit was
placed on their swimming in the Basin, except that of the law which
prohibited it in the daytime, as the Basin was quite in the heart of the
town. In the warm summer nights of that southerly latitude, the water
swarmed with laughing, shouting, screaming boys, who plunged from the
banks and rioted in the delicious water, diving and ducking, flying and
following, safe in the art of swimming which all of them knew. They
turned somersaults from the decks of the canal-boats; some of the boys
could turn double somersaults, and one boy got so far as to turn a
somersault and a half; it was long before the time of electric lighting,
but when he struck the water there came a flash that seemed to illumine
the universe.

I am afraid that the Young People will think I am telling them too much
about swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind of
amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost
as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the
river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very
first things that my boy co