PASSAGE FROM CHILDHOOD TO YOUTH 31 



bloodthirstiness, that demoniac fury, which is in all men. I 

 had afterward in my boyhood and later a number of fights, but 

 in no other instance has the slaying motive been aroused ; so far 

 as I can discern, the situations have provoked a rather intense 

 sense of merriment, and the desire to do the antagonist no 

 unnecessary harm. Another effect of this crisis was to make an 

 end of all my fear of men and beasts. When in danger of assault 

 there has always been a keen reckoning on the situation with a 

 singular assurance that my wits would see me through. 



My preposterous contest with "Bill Button" appears to have 

 made an end of my fancy for war. As above noted, I am inclined 

 to believe that this devotion of some years' duration was a 

 natural device to support my spirit in its fear, an ideal of 

 brave doing set over against the mastering sense of cowardice. 

 In place of the old fear of external enemies there came to me 

 a new terror lest the newly discovered fury should break out 

 again. This secondary fear made no permanent impression, 

 though its moral value to a growing lad was considerable. I am 

 inclined to think that this trifling incident marks my passage 

 from childhood to the youth in which the mind begins to feel 

 the wider realm. So far as I can see, I thereafter began to look 

 upon the world with a man's eyes, though it was with scanty 

 intelligence. This seems therefore a fit place to set forth the 

 conditions of the place and people where I was to take some- 

 thing like adult shape. 



The village of Newport, Kentucky, at the time when I was 

 born was a place of perhaps a thousand inhabitants. To a 

 casual observer it would have seemed as a mere outskirt of the 

 large and prosperous town of Cincinnati on the northern side 

 of the Ohio River, with which it was connected by a ferry. Its 

 only title to distinction was that it was the seat of a government 

 military post, which occupied a few acres at the angle where the 

 Licking River enters the larger stream. Although the measur- 

 able distance between the two places is not more than a third 

 of a mile, they were in the old days much more widely separated 



