A Boy’s Town
Excerpts from the book By William Dean Howells.
In the Boy's Town they had regular games and plays, which came and went in a
stated order. The first thing in the spring as soon as the frost began to come
out of the ground, they had marbles which they played till the weather began to
be pleasant for the game, and then they left it off. There were some
mean-spirited fellows who played for fun, but any boy who was anything played
for keeps: that is, keeping all the marbles he won. As my boy was skilful at
marbles, he was able to start out in the morning with his toy, or the marble c
.*. he shot with, and a commy, or a brown marble of the lowest value, and come
home at night with a pocketful of white-alleys and blood-alleys, striped
plasters and bull's-eyes, and crystals, clear and clouded. His gambling was not
approved of at home, but it was allowed him because of the hardness of his
heart, I suppose, and because it was not thought well to keep him up too
strictly; and I suspect it would have been useless to forbid his playing for
keeps, though he came to have a bad conscience about it before he gave it up.
There were three kinds of games at marbles which the boys played: one with a
long ring marked out on the ground, and a base some distance off, which you
began to shoot from; another with a round ring, whose line formed the base ; and
another with holes, three or five, hollowed in the earth at equal distances from
each other, which was called knucks. You could play for keeps in all these
games; and in knucks, if you won, you had a shot or shots at the knuckles of the
fellow who lost, and who was obliged to hold them down for you to shoot at.
Fellows who were mean would twitch their knuckles away when they saw your toy
coming, and run; but most of them took their punishment with the savage pluck of
so many little Sioux. As the game began in the raw cold of the earliest spring,
every boy had chapped hands, and nearly every one had the skin worn off the
knuckle of his middle finger from resting it on the ground when he shot. You
could use a knuckle-dabster of fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but it was
considered effeminate, and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway.
Marbles were always very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as
that of a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up : whether a
boy took-up, or edged beyond the very place where his toy lay when he shot;
whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground in shooting; whether,
when another boy's toy drove one marble against another and knocked both out of
the ring, he holloed "Fen doubs!" before the other fellow holloed " Doubs !"
whether a marble was in or out of the ring, and whether the umpire's decision
was just or not. The gambling and the quarrelling went on till the second-bell
rang for school, and began again as soon as the boys could get back to their
rings when school let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with a
stick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy, the side
of a fellow's boot would do, and the hollows for knucks were always bored by
twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy to wear out his boots very
rapidly, but that was what his boots were made for, just as the sidewalks were
made for the boys' marble-rings, and a citizen's character for cleverness or
meanness was fixed by his walking round or over the rings. Cleverness was used
in the
