City boy

“ The boys of gangs in the country play that they are armies, emperors, or kings that they have read of in books or heard of in stories told. But the city boys of the West Side prefer to imitate local celebrities whom they know or local deeds of fame with which they are more intimately acquainted. And the danger of this vulgarized hero worship lies in the fact that, while a country lad must imagine the surroundings and implements for imitating the deeds of story book heroes, the city boy can find on every side of him the real materials used by his models, the Gophers. ”

“ The city lad is ashamed of his country brother. The plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of the other. The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no chance in life," and envies the city youth. ”

“ The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country youth. The young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits. ”

“ Bumble—could ever find him there! He had often heard the old men in the workhouse, too, say that no lad of spirit need want in London; and that there were ways of living in that vast city, which those who had been bred up in country parts had no idea of. It was the very place for a homeless boy, who must die in the streets unless some one helped him. ”

“ The landlord had his windows to mind, and the policeman his lamps and the city ordinances which prohibit even kite-flying below Fourteenth Street where the crowds are. The ball had no chance at all. We have seen in New York a boy shot down by a policeman for the heinous offence of playing football in the street on Thanksgiving Day. But a boy who cannot kick a ball around has no chance of growing up a decent and orderly citizen. He must have his childhood, so that he may be fitted to give to the community his manhood. The average boy is just like a little steam-engine with steam always up. ”

“ Daddy gave him two ten-cent pieces, and he put them in the little slit and heard the bell ring twice.
Sunny Boy had never been so happy. He liked to look down from the high top of the bus and watch the motors and the people in the street. At nearly every cross street they had to stop while traffic went the other way, and often there would be four or five automobiles abreast. Once Sunny, looking down, saw a little boy in a beautiful car looking up at him. Sunny Boy waved, and the little boy smiled delightedly and waved back. ”

“ Boys are boys in all lands, and a knowledge of that peculiar species of human beings, the boarding-school boy, is convincing that, given a prospect of five or six hours of uninterrupted solitude, no youth of proper spirit would fail to avail himself of the opportunities thus offered to see life, particularly with a city like Paris within easy "hooky" distance. ”

“ While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. ”

“ Being a boy in a crowded city and being a boy in a village are two different things, though boys the world over are always boys. The balance of fun and sport is, after all, in favor of the city lad, the offspring of the tenement-house. ”

“ You know what has been the past life of our boys; how they have been brought up in neglect and privation in the city streets, subject to little restraint, and without careful instruction. You can’t expect them to be models of all the virtues. ”

“ They watched him pass through the gate and down the platform, and saw a brakeman point to the train he was to board. At the steps Joe turned again, and waved to them.
"I'm glad he's out of New York," declared Mr. Horton. "This city is no place for a friendless boy. And now you and Sunny Boy go on up to the Museum, and I'll see you at dinner." [206]
Sunny Boy enjoyed another ride on top of his beloved bus, and then he and Mother spent a couple of busy and happy hours looking at the wonderful exhibits in the Museum of Natural History. ”

“ But it is not only in the slums that the tendencies of the modern boy may be studied. In the more respectable parts of town, in the vicinity of schools and in the neighborhood of churches may be seen evidences of what the youth of today think play. ”

“ Horton did their packing and the trunk was sent early to the station. Sunny Boy was just as excited at the prospect of going home as he had been at the idea of the trip to New York.
"But what will you do all the time at home?" teased Jack the bell-boy, when Sunny Boy went to say good-bye to him.
"Oh, I'm going to school," announced Sunny Boy proudly. "All the children that I know go. Harriet's going to take me till I get used to it, and then Mother says p'haps I can go by myself." ”

“ A garden plot, small live stock, pets, woodpile, and workshop are all out of the question, for the city has deprived the average boy not only of fit living quarters but of the opportunity to enact a fair part of his glorious life-drama within the friendly atmosphere of home. ”

“ Considering the training our children have had in the city streets, they conduct{44} themselves remarkably well in their new homes. Removed from the temptations and privations of the city, their better natures assert themselves, and they behave as well as ordinary children. In fact, I may say that most of the complaints that come to us are of a trivial nature. People forget that our boys are no more perfect than their own, and if now and then they pelt the cows, or leave the turkeys out in the rain, that hardly indicates a depraved heart.”
Mr. Taylor smiled. ”

“ From the consideration of bodily health the village boy is better off than his city cousin. He also enjoys to a far greater degree the protective and educative attention of real neighborhood life. The opinions and customs which help to mold him are more personal. He probably holds himself more accountable, for he can more readily trace the results of any course of action in terms of the welfare and good-will of well-known persons. ”

“ The normal boy has come honestly by his love of adventure, his motor propensities and his gang instincts. It is when you take this healthy biological product and set him down in the midst of city restrictions that serious trouble ensues. For the city has been built for economic convenience, and with little thought for human welfare. ”

“ Others go too far the other way and write stories that give young readers a wrong idea of life—stories whose heroes do improbable and unnatural acts. While my purpose has been to make The Boy Broker interesting I have aimed to give a true idea of life in a great city. So much nonsense of a misleading character has been written about benevolent old gentlemen who help poor boys from the country that I have sought to turn the light of fact on the subject and picture a little real life—about such life as a boy may expect to find if he comes to New York friendless and alone. ”

“ No American small-town father ever understands boys like Gareth Johns, boys with imagination and the creative impulse; they are looked upon with vague distrust and suspicion, at best, with a certain condescension. It seems incredible, indeed, to most small-town minds that any boy should not grow up with the ideal of becoming a retail boot and shoe merchant. ”

“ I call it a Boy's Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things. He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angels ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy's world. ”

“ There were other people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these were the professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, if not corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four of them, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deep interest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. [229] I do not think any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavish lives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, and plagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them. ”

“ I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory of such a sight. Once there were two chariots—one held the band in red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it in rapture through every turn and winding of its course in the Boy's Town ”

“ There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. ”

“ Four hundred boys cannot well be brought together, without making some stir. Every morning and afternoon, as the pupils went to and from school, the streets in the neighborhood would for a few minutes seem to swarm with boys, of every imaginable size, shape, manners, dress, and appearance. ”

“ You see I am at work down-town most of the day, and the boy spends long hours by the window watching his neighbors go in and out, and he amuses himself by weaving little stories about them until he comes to regard them as personal friends. ”

“ To them there is neither foul nor fair, clean nor unclean. They have not the least discomfort from being dirty or unkempt, and they certainly find no pleasure in being washed and combed and clad in fresh linen. They do not like to see other boys so; if a boy looking sleek and smooth came among the boys that my boy went with in the Boy's Town, they made it a reproach to him, and hastened to help him spoil his clothes and his nice looks. Some of those boys had hands as hard as horn, cracked open at the knuckles and in the palms, and the crevices blackened with earth or grime ”

“ In a temper of wistful sentimentality and self-satisfaction, arrayed in the colours of the old boys' society, the ex-public school boy leans out of the carriage window, waves good-bye to the friends who are catching a later train, makes and extracts promises to write, and watches as the train moves out of the station the familiar landmarks slip one by one behind him. ”

“ The worst school in this world that any boy can go to is the school of the street. The school of the street turns out the most impure, the most dishonest and the most illiterate boys, and those boys and girls who ever rise to be anything or anybody in the world are the ones who leave the influences of the street in due time, as Little Joe did. The street offers most of its work and most of its attractions at night, as many boys can tell. The life of the street leads to no career that is worth following. ”

“ Yes, it is good for them to go out of cities. A city child is a cruel, wicked, shapeless, one-sided abortion. 'Tis a pale shoot of a plant, struggling bravely for its little day of life in some rayless corner, all unblest by the warm sunshine which God intended to give to it color, strength, and fragrance. What wonder that the blight falls on it? Do you say, Pshaw? Do you suppose a child, for instance, could appreciate the scenery at the Caatskills? ”

“ The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place so overwhelmingly democratic as the Boy's Town were not such as could have warranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as the world goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in their way they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men to work for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, as they grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grew old enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office before he was ten years of age. ”

“ They often have very exciting adventures such as my boy and his mates never had; they rescue one another from shipwreck and Indians; and if ever they are caught in a burning building, or cast away on a desolate island, they know just exactly what to do.
But, I am ashamed to say, it was all very different in the Boy's Town; and I might as well make a clean breast of it while I am about it. The fellows in that town were every one dreadfully lazy—that is, they never wanted to do any thing they were set to do; but if they set themselves to do anything, they would work themselves to death at it. ”

“ In the kind of suburb that walks always with a hole in its stocking, slatternly maids pressed their bosoms against area-railings chaffing with butcher-boy or policeman—their idea of love. Where a street-organ struck up, little children gathered, dancing in the gutter. ”

“ My boy had been taught that this world was only an illusion, a shadow thrown from the real world beyond; and no doubt his father and mother believed what they taught him; but he had always seen them anxious to keep the illusion, and in his turn he clung to the vain shadow with all the force of his being.
He got well of the cholera, but not of the homesickness, and after a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy's Town. ”

“ Their youthfulness is to me a thing of very poignant, tender beauty. I see again that radiant boy, trailing clouds of glory come from God who was his home. His childhood spent in "a town less than a hundred miles from New York," "now he feels himself actually a New Yorker," "enjoys the proud novelty of working for wages," and "joyfully, therefore, he goes forth every noon to explore the [Pg 25] territory of his new possession." The subway was to him "the great nickel adventure"; a ride on the elevated railroad, "aërial journeying"; his alarm clock, "the urban chanticleer." ”