I knew a boy, twelve or thirteen years old, who was sent to help a drover with some cattle as far as a certain village ten miles from his home.  After the place was reached, and while the boy was eating his cracker and candies, he strolled about the village, and fell in with some other boys playing upon a bridge.  In a short time a large number of children of all sizes had collected upon the bridge.  The new-comer was presently challenged by the boys of his own age to jump with them.  This he readily did, and cleared their farthest mark.  Then he gave them a sample of his stone-throwing, and at this pastime he also far surpassed his competitors.  Before long, the feeling of the crowd began to set against him, showing itself first in the smaller fry, who began half playfully to throw pebbles and lumps of dry earth at him.  Then they would run up slyly and strike him with sticks.  Presently the large ones began to tease him in like manner, till the contagion of hostility spread, and the whole pack was arrayed against the strange boy.  He kept them at bay for a few moments with his stick, till, the feeling mounting higher and higher, he broke through their ranks, and fled precipitately toward home, with the throng of little and big at his heels.  Gradually the girls and smaller boys dropped behind, till at the end of the first fifty rods only two boys of about his own size, with wrath and determination in their faces, kept up the pursuit.  But to these he added the final insult of beating them at running also, and reached, much blown, a point beyond which they refused to follow.

The world the boy lives in is separate and distinct from the world the man lives in.  It is a world inhabited only by boys.  No events are important or of any moment save those affecting boys.  How they ignore the presence of their elders on the street, shouting out their invitations, their appointments, their pass-words from our midst, as from the veriest solitude!  They have peculiar calls, whistles, signals, by which they communicate with each other at long distances, like birds or wild creatures.  And there is as genuine a wildness about these notes and calls as about those of a fox or a coon.

The boy is a savage, a barbarian, in his taste,—­devouring roots, leaves, bark, unripe fruit; and in the kind of music or discord he delights in,—­of harmony he has no perception.  He has his fashions that spread from city to city.  In one of our large cities the rage at one time was an old tin can with a string attached, out of which they tortured the most savage and ear-splitting discords.  The police were obliged to interfere and suppress the nuisance.  On another occasion, at Christmas, they all came forth with tin horns, and nearly drove the town distracted with the hideous uproar.

Another savage trait of the boy is his untruthfulness.  Corner him, and the chances are ten to one he will lie his way out.  Conscience is a plant of slow growth in the boy.  If caught in one lie, he invents another.  I know a boy who was in the habit of eating apples in school.  His teacher finally caught him in the act, and, without removing his eye from him, called him to the middle of the floor.