alarm and indignation:  “I’m lost; mammy’s lost me; I told the darned thing she’d lose me.”  The recognition of his own liability to be lost, and at the same time the recognition of his own superior wisdom, are exquisitely characteristic.  They would be quite incongruous in the son of any other soil.  In his intercourse with strangers this feeling exhibits itself in the complete self-possession and sang-froid of the youthful citizen of the Western Republic.  He scorns to own a curiosity which he dare not openly seek to satisfy by direct questions, and he puts his questions accordingly on all subjects, even the most private and even in the case of the most reverend strangers.  He is perfectly free in his remarks upon all that strikes him as strange or reprehensible in any one’s personal appearance or behaviour; and he never dreams that his victims might prefer not to be criticised in public.  But he is quick to resent criticism on himself, and he shows the most perverted ingenuity in embroiling with his family any outsider who may rashly attempt to restrain his ebullitions.  He is, in fact, like the Scottish thistle:  no one may meddle with him with impunity.  It is better to “never mind him,” as one of the evils under the sun for which there is no remedy.

Probably this development of the American small boys is due in great measure to the absorption of their fathers in business, which necessarily surrenders the former to a too undiluted “regiment of women.”  For though Thackeray is unquestionably right in estimating highly the influence of refined feminine society upon youths and young men, there is no doubt that a small boy is all the better for contact with some one whose physical prowess commands his respect.  Some allowance must also be made for the peevishness of boys condemned to prolonged railway journeys, and to the confinement of hotel life in cities and scenes in which they are not old enough to take an interest.  They would, doubtless, be more genial if they were left behind at school.

The American boy has no monopoly of the characteristics under consideration.  His little sister is often his equal in all departments.  Miss Marryat tells of a little girl of five who appeared alone in the table d’hote room of a large and fashionable hotel, ordered a copious and variegated breakfast, and silenced the timorous misgivings of the waiter with “I guess I pay my way.”  At another hotel I heard a similar little minx, in a fit of infantile rage, address her mother as “You nasty, mean, old crosspatch;” and the latter, who in other respects seemed a very sensible and intelligent woman, yielded to the storm, and had no words of rebuke.  I am afraid it was a little boy who in the same way called his father a “black-eyed old skunk;” but it might just as well have been a girl.