There were very few places of amusement or entertainment in the Boy's
Town that were within a boy's reach. There were at least a dozen places
where a man could get whiskey, but only one where he could get
ice-cream, and the boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit this
resort. But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the outskirts of the
town, which my boy remembered visiting when he was a very little fellow,
with his brother. There were two large old mulberry-trees in this
garden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries,
and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all the
mulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a tame crow that my boy
understood could talk if it liked; but it only ran after him, and tried
to bite his legs. Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, or
puzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out among
bushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could find
your way out. My boy, though he had hold of his brother's hand, did not
expect to get out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he had
some notion that his end would be hastened by the tame crow. His first
visit to the pleasure-garden was his last; and it passed so wholly out
of his consciousness that he never knew what became of it any more than
if it had been taken up into the clouds.
He tasted ice-cream there for the first time, and had his doubts about
it, though a sherry-glass full of it cost a fip, and it ought to have
been good for such a sum as that. Later in life, he sometimes went to
the saloon where it was sold in the town, and bashfully gasped out a
demand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. But
the boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not miss
them much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arising
from the woods and waters all about them that they did not need public
amusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. I
have tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the daily
arrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust if
I failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of the
old-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy's Town and Cincinnati. I
dare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it looked
as large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; and
they assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civic
pride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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