models. Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at
frequent intervals with some girl -- always more or less the same
little girl -- who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her,
except rather familiar and provincial manners, until they married
and bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching
one's self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to
suit the standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered
the mind of a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his
parents. From women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing
else. He might not even catch the idea that women had more to
give. The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.

To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to
most boys much the more interesting. A successful blackguard must
enjoy great physical advantages besides a true vocation, and
Henry Adams had neither; but no boy escaped some contact with
vice of a very low form. Blackguardism came constantly under
boys' eyes, and had the charm of force and freedom and
superiority to culture or decency. One might fear it, but no one
honestly despised it. Now and then it asserted itself as
education more roughly than school ever did. One of the commonest
boy-games of winter, inherited directly from the
eighteenth-century, was a game of war on Boston Common. In old
days the two hostile forces were called North-Enders and
South-Enders. In 1850 the North-Enders still survived as a
legend, but in practice it was a battle of the Latin School
against all comers, and the Latin School, for snowball, included
all the boys of the West End. Whenever, on a half-holiday, the
weather was soft enough to soften the snow, the Common was apt to