Elliott Flower

“ Escape from the guard-house was far from impossible. The door was locked and a sentinel was placed in front of it, but this was largely a matter of form. The fear of consequences alone held boys in confinement. One might easily run away, but where to? This problem did not worry Harry a moment. He was not going to face a wrathful father who would send him back; he was going to tell the judge that the contract was broken, and the judge would understand.
“Have you money enough to get to Chicago?” asked Dick. ”

“ My boys are as good as the average, but all boys are rough in some ways, and it is hardly possible that he will not be made to feel his failings. In spite of all I can do, he will be the butt of ridicule, when he should have sympathy and encouragement.”
“He needs discipline,” said Anson Raymond, the man who had brought Jimmie to the school. “There is the making of a fine man in him, but so far he has been allowed to run wild, except for occasional attendance at the public schools. Judge Kendal of the Juvenile Court succeeded in getting a hold on him ”

“ Every salesman does it, every merchant does it, every professional man does it; every successful man studies individual cases and makes his plans according to the requirements of the particular situation. ”

“ When you went in to settle things for yourself, you were trying to make your own laws, and that ’s anarchy, I am constantly sending people to jail because they refuse to accept any law except that which they make for themselves. ”

“ This leads them to break the laws that are made for the common good, and they aught to go to jail.”
“Ought I to go to jail?” asked Harry.
“Well, I am quite sure you ought to go back to school,’ said the judge. “You have made a mistake, Harry,—a natural one under the circumstances,—and when a good man makes a mistake he accepts the consequences without a whimper.”
“Nobody ever heard me whimper!” protested the boy.
“To run away is much the same thing. ”

“ We study men for our own business advantage; why not boys? Men have their peculiarities as well as boys, and we accommodate ourselves to those peculiarities in practically all the important affairs of life. ”

“ Thereupon the offending boy was promptly knocked down.
“Harry,” said the principal, with a sigh, when the matter was brought to his attention, “if you had been here longer I would have to punish you severely for that.”
“He was mockin’ me,” protested Harry.
“That was wrong,” admitted the principal; “but the punishment of wrong-doing is the duty of the authorities, and not of each individual. A school is a government on a small scale and must be conducted as such. In the city or the State we have the courts and the police ”

“ He and Mr. Raymond were to be “pals,” as he expressed it, and the school was merely a necessary step toward this. Consequently Mr. Raymond should be his model rather than the warrior he had read about, and Mr. Raymond had no nickname.
“All right,” he announced. “‘Harry Bagley’ goes. Me an’ him,” indicating Mr. Raymond, “understands each other, an’ I ’m goin’ to do what ’s right. He ’s goin’ to need me, an’ I ’m goin’ to need him.”
‘“What ’s de matter wid ‘Jimmie Dandy’?’ demanded the boy.”
The principal looked distressed. ”

“ It was the humiliation of defeat rather than anger that he felt, and he had more than the average boy’s respect for physical prowess. “You ‘re all right, too—if you don’t think I’m easy.”
“I don’t.”
After shaking hands and removing some of the signs of combat from faces and clothing.—for even the victor had suffered considerably,—they gave some thought to their situation. Harry was rebellious, but Dick took it quite as a matter of course. There would be extra drill for all spectators, he said, in addition to from twenty-four to forty-eight hours of con-
The fight behind the Guard-house. ”