[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: "ONE DAY HE CAME UP TO MY BOY WHERE HE SAT FISHING."
[See p. 66]]
A BOY'S TOWN
DESCRIBED FOR "HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE"
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "THE SHADOW OF A DREAM" "APRIL HOPES" "A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
BOOKS BY W. D. HOWELLS
Annie Kilburn. 12mo.
April Hopes. 12mo.
Between the Dark and Daylight. New, Edition. 12mo.
Boy life. Illustrated. 12mo.
Boy's Town. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
Certain Delightful English Towns. Illustrated. 8vo. Traveller's Edition, Leather.
Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 12mo. Holiday Edition. Illustrated. 4to.
Coast of Bohemia. Illustrated. 12mo.
Criticism and Fiction. Portrait. 16mo.
Day of Their Wedding. Illustrated. 12mo.
Familiar Spanish Travels. Illustrated. 8vo.
Fennel and Rue. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
Flight of Pony Baker. Post 8vo.
Hazard of New Fortunes. New Edition. 12mo.
Heroines of Fiction. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo.
Imaginary Interviews. 8vo.
Imperative Duty. 12mo. Paper.
Impressions and Experiences. New Edition. 12mo.
Kentons. 12mo.
Landlord at Lion's Head. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
Letters Home. 12mo.
Library of Universal Adventure. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth. Three-quarter Calf.
Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Illustrated. 8vo.
Literature and Life. 8vo.
Little Swiss Sojourn. Illustrated. 32mo.
London Films. Illustrated. 8vo. Traveller's Edition, Leather.
Miss Bellard's Inspiration. 12mo.
Modern Italian Poets. Illustrated. 12mo.
Mother and the Father. Illustrated. New Edition. 12mo.
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: A Boy's Town by William Dean Howells
- 2: The hydraulic and its reservoirs
- 3: From a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir
- 4: Grist mills on the river and canal
- 5: Besides the surfeit of this little axe
- 6: And he is standing in the yawl
- 7: He had long ceased to be a Quaker
- 8: The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit
- 9: Which he pretended to have copied
- 10: They may or may not have belonged to Dowd
- 11: The garret abounded in their own family boxes and barrels
- 12: As the father had once taught English grammar in six lessons
- 13: Perhaps because his name was Whistler
- 14: These mills were mostly failures
- 15: Where pieces of drift would whirl round and round
- 16: The boys had deep swimming holes and shallow ones
- 17: And that a parrot a screaming
- 18: Some of the boys could turn double somersaults
- 19: Afterwards he learned to skate
- 20: He hurled himself upon the drunkard
- 21: The hydraulic and its reservoirs
- 22: A boy was standing at the brink of a culvert
- 23: About their bases was the best kind of place for sunfish
- 24: For pawpaws or for hickory nuts
- 25: The prize was a little history of Lexington
- 26: Where I suppose some chemical apparatus must have been kept
- 27: The Hydraulic ran alongside of the Academy
- 28: Lithe rod through his left hand
- 29: This was a part called Prosody
- 30: When the teacher was driven desperate
- 31: For perhaps the teacher is no longer living
- 32: They seemed to know by instinct that this was Buz Simpson
- 33: And a boy bought a lady bite and then took a hog bite
- 34: Their fights were mostly informal scuffles
- 35: Most of the fellows had stoga boots
- 36: I do not know why a velvet cap was despised
- 37: Before the other fellow holloed Doubs
- 38: Foot ball was always played with a bladder
- 39: The flatteries and caresses were not needed
- 40: The kites were of various shapes bow kites
- 41: One might think that kite flying
- 42: Two kites would become entangled
- 43: It was in not running off with a circus
- 44: Before the circus doors were open
- 45: And then outgrow them as he did
- 46: Where one of the supes catches it
- 47: And circuses lasted a good while
- 48: Though they respected Herr Driesbach
- 49: I do not know why the zebra should have had this repute
- 50: And the grimness of the sacristan
- 51: But most Easter eggs never outlasted Easter Day
- 52: Most of the April foolings were harmless enough
- 53: After the regular town drunkards
- 54: Who rang a bell to open the market
- 55: To be the Bridish when they were playing war
- 56: And the Bridish always got whipped
- 57: And you had to wear strands of buckeyes round your neck
- 58: And once there was a Whig barbecue
- 59: He had to have a small collar for the coon
- 60: But the coon kept shifting about
- 61: The great Whig who won the battle of Tippecanoe
- 62: Nanny would gladly eat a chip hat
- 63: That day they all laid off their bonnets on the hall table
- 64: There was a turtle in the hogshead
- 65: And furnished with shining steel stirrups
- 66: Except here and there a pawpaw thicket
- 67: Braves and squaws and pappooses
- 68: Because he found no kildees to shoot at on the Common
- 69: And got a blow over his left eye from a shinny stick
- 70: Yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase
- 71: To shoot ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall
- 72: Now and then they passed near some woodchoppers
- 73: But the boys gathered them every spring
- 74: Red haws came a little before chinquepins
- 75: With half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon
- 76: There was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay
- 77: And that this son was named William Willshire Riley
- 78: He who picketh up this cap picketh up a fortune
- 79: Though he listened to the poems his father read aloud
- 80: Two up and two down click click
- 81: I CANNOT quite understand why the theatre
- 82: If he had known just what Raca meant
- 83: Throwing sods and yelling and holloing
- 84: Given him because he could whistle like a piccolo flute
- 85: Their friendship declined from this point
- 86: You could eat any kind of green apple
- 87: And the other gravestones standing and leaning about
- 88: He believed that warts came from playing with toads
- 89: But there were some large blacksnakes
- 90: But besides these superstitions
- 91: You are in your seventeenth year now
- 92: I never knew a boy who loved flowers
- 93: Three pins would buy a bite of apple
- 94: And usually he is ashamed of knowing better
- 95: To invade an orchard or garden
- 96: At the Dutch bakery there were pretzels
- 97: And the foreman of the Neptune
- 98: And one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries
- 99: The boys always called Cincinnati The City
- 100: There were no fires in bedrooms
- 101: And these were the professional drunkards
- 102: As soon as the gauger had left them
- 103: For all the packet drivers chewed
- 104: Which were not so common as ague
- 105: Who had not become the tool of the slaveholders
- 106: The gates were opened wider and wider
- 107: During the summer the cholera came
- 108: Unbotton changed to unbutton begins to unbutton Page 190