ompleted his recovery and his education there.
But all through the years when he lived in the Boy's Town he had
intervals of schooling, which broke in upon the swimming and the
skating, of course, but were not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable.

They began, as they are apt to do, with lessons in a private house,
where a lady taught several other children, and where he possibly
learned to read; though he could only remember being set on a platform
in punishment for some forgotten offence. After that he went to school
in the basement of a church, where a number of boys and girls were
taught by a master who knew how to endear study at least to my boy.
There was a garden outside of the schoolroom; hollyhocks grew in it, and
the boys gathered the little cheeses, as they called the seed-buttons
which form when the flowers drop off, and ate them, because boys will
eat anything, and not because they liked them. With the fact of this
garden is mixed a sense of drowsy heat and summer light, and that is
all, except the blackboard at the end of the room and a big girl doing
sums at it; and the wonder why the teacher smiled when he read in one of
the girls' compositions a phrase about forging puddings and pies; my boy
did not know what forging meant, so he must have been very young. But he
had a zeal for learning, and somehow he took a prize in geography--a
science in which he was never afterwards remarkable. The prize was a
little history of Lexington, Mass., which the teacher gave him, perhaps
because Lexington may have been his native town; but the history must
have been very dryly told, for not a fact of it remained in the boy's
mind. He was vaguely disappointed in the book, but he valued it for the
teacher's sake whom he was secretly very fond of, and who had no doubt
won the child's heart by some flattering notice. He thought it a great
happiness to follow him, when the teacher gave up this school, and took
charge of one of the public schools; but it was not the same there; the
teacher could not distinguish him in that multitude of boys and girls.
He did himself a little honor in spelling, but he won no praise, and he
disgraced himself then as always in arithmetic. He sank into the common
herd of mediocrities; and then, when his family went to live in another
part of the town, he began to go to another school. He had felt that the
teacher belonged to him, and it must have been a pang to find him so
estranged. But he was a k