William Dean Howells 
Boy’s Town 

I CALL it a Boy’s Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a Harper’s Young People will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing – they have been used so often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody’s boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.