Occasionally Neale thought of New York, an almost mythical spot, though he went there once in a while with Mother on tiresome quests for clothes, as well as to matinees; sometimes he thought of the ships and the wharves, and how much he wished he could see more of them. But mostly he forgot the actual world. He was in command of the fort. All around him his brave men were working the guns. Bang! Bang! The enemy were marching along those straight paved streets. Their cannon balls were bursting all around, but the garrison did not quail. Their sharp-shooters were starting to climb the rocks. Ah, this was serious! No time for delay. The commander seized the rifle from the hand of a dying soldier ... how plainly Neale saw that dying soldier there at his feet ... bang! bang! bang! ... with every shot one of the foremost scalers dropped headlong. The engagement was a decisive victory. CHAPTER IV Inevitably Saturdays were all devoted to play. Neither Neale's parents nor he himself could have conceived of any other way of spending Saturdays. What were Saturdays for? It is true that in some of the more prosperous German-American families, Saturday was music-lesson day, just as four o'clock instead of ushering in roller-skating or marbles meant sitting in front of a piano, or stooping over a 'cello. But Neale felt for play-mates thus victimized the same slightly contemptuous pity he felt for Jimmy Taylor's lameness, and the same unsurprised acceptance of his own good luck in being free from such limitations. Once in a while, too, Mother took him over to New York to a matinee, and that was all right, too, if it didn't happen too often. Neale liked going out with Mother pretty well, and if there was fighting in the play he liked it fine. But all that was having something done to you, a sensation of which school gave Neale more than enough, and which he didn't like half so well--oh, not a quarter as well--oh, really not at all, compared to the sensation of starting something and running it yourself. If it really came right down to a comparison, there wasn't any fun at all in seeing Irving pretend to be a crazy man, compared to the fun of starting out Saturday morning, with no idea what you were going to do, and rustling around till you got enough fellows together for the game of the season. To stand in your old play-clothes on your front-step, of a Saturday morning, all the world before you, unfettered by obligations, a long, long, rich day of play before you that was _yours_ ... how could anybody be expected to prefer to dress up in things you had to try to keep clean, sit in a dark, hot theater and watch painted-up men and women carry on like all possessed about things that weren't really so. But that was all right enough for a change, and was as good a way as any to spend a rainy afternoon. Also, you could occasionally get ideas about fights, out of a play.