“Boy, what does it mean?” said I.  “Boys must be allowed to come into this railway station.  There are two now standing in the doorway directly under the sign.”

The latent sympathy in my tone touched his heart.  He left his seat, and, coming to mine, edged in past me; and, putting his head out of the window, read the sentence aloud in a contemptuous tone.  Then he offered me a peanut, which I took; and he proceeded to tell me what he thought of the sign.

“Boys not allowed!” said he.  “That’s just the way ’tis everywhere; but I never saw the sign up before.  It don’t make any difference, though, whether they put the sign up or not.  Why, in New York (you live in New York, don’t you?) they won’t even stop the horse-cars for a boy to get on.  Nobody thinks any thing’ll hurt a boy; but they’re glad enough to ‘allow’ us when there’s any errands to be done, and”—­

“Do you live in New York?” interrupted I; for I did not wish to hear the poor little fellow’s list of miseries, which I knew by heart beforehand without his telling me, having been hopeless knight-errant of oppressed boyhood all my life.

Yes, he “lived in New York,” and he “went to a grammar school,” and he had “two sisters.”  And so we talked on in that sweet, ready, trustful talk which comes naturally only from children’s lips, until the “twenty minutes for refreshments” were over, and the choked and crammed passengers, who had eaten big dinners in that breath of time, came hurrying back to their seats.  Among them came the father and mother of my little friend.  In angry surprise at not finding him in the seat where they left him, they exclaimed,—­

“Now, where is that boy?  Just like him!  We might have lost every one of these bags.”

“Here I am, mamma,” he called out, pleasantly.  “I could see the bags all the time.  Nobody came into the car.”

“I told you not to leave the seat, sir.  What do you mean by such conduct?” said the father.

“Oh, no, papa,” said poor Boy, “you only told me to take care of the bags.”  And an anxious look of terror came into his face, which told only too well under how severe a regime he lived.  I interposed hastily with—­

“I am afraid I am the cause of your little son’s leaving his seat.  He had sat very still till I spoke to him; and I believe I ought to take all the blame.”

The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow people.  Their irritation with him was merely a surface vexation, which had no real foundation in a deep principle.  They became complaisant and smiling at my first word, and Boy escaped with a look of great relief to another seat, where they gave him a simple luncheon of saleratus gingerbread.  “Boys not allowed” to go in to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to myself; and upon that text I sat sadly meditating all the way from Springfield to Boston.