open, and angels
ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and
he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy's world.
Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep the
ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven has
been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not know
what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that the
ungrown-up children will, and that the boys who read _Harper's Young
People_ will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even
if he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I
mean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing--they have been used
so often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings
and dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings and
dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my
boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody's boy; and I mean him
sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.

[Illustration: THE "FIRST LOCK."]

It seems to me that my Boy's Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a
boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as
blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another
river, called the Old River, which was the Miami's former channel, and
which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The
Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it
was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a
First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but
the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was
very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a
Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill power through
the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the
Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran
under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams
and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they
had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice of
the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then
there were the Commons; a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows
were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and
practised for their