All round the Boy's Town stood the forest, with the trees that must have been well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from their shadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets and houses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where the woods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not very dense², and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more like trees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or no undergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket³; and there were sometimes grassy⁴ spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched their pretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time, it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grass that took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness⁵ with an image of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely my conjecture⁶, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall of forest that enclosed the Boy's Town was without a break except where the axe⁷ had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but, nearer or farther, the forest encompassed⁸ the town, and it called the boys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by its shore, with mysterious, alluring⁹ voices, kindling¹⁰ the blood, taking the soul[149] with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy's Town who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of

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