The Jack of All Trades.
CHAPTER I.
TREE-TOP CLUB HOUSES.
It is now over thirty years since the writer was first initiated into the delights of a boys’ club-house in the tree-tops, and it happened in this way:
The war of the Rebellion was over; for four years the fathers, big brothers, teachers, and policemen of the border States had had so much serious fighting on their own hands that little or no attention was paid to the growing generation of boys, and they were left to fight their own battles in their own way.
For four eventful years these boys were under practically no other restraint than the little their poor half-distracted mothers could enforce. The boys, however, did not appear to miss the discipline, nor desire it, and, as far as their physical health was concerned, they throve and developed into lusty lads, though many of them recognized no law but that of physical force.