CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy Wants to Be an Orphan—The Bad Boy Goes to an Orphan Asylum—The Government Gives the Bad Boy’s Pa an Appointment to Travel Over the World and Get Information About Airships, Dirigible Balloons and Everything to Help Our Government Know What Other Governments Are Doing in Case of War.
I have always wanted to be an orphan and I guess now I have got my wish.
I have watched orphans a whole lot and they have seemed to me to have the easiest job outside of politics.
To see a good mess of orphans at an Orphan Asylum, with no parents to butt in and interfere with your enjoyment has seemed to me to be an ideal existence.
When a boy has a father that he has to watch constantly to keep him from going wrong he has no time to have any fun, but to belong to a syndicate of orphans, with an easy old maid matron to look after the whole bunch, an individual orphan who has ginger in him can have the time of his young life. At least that is the way it has always seemed to me.
They set on the food at an orphanage, and if you have a pretty good reach, you can get enough corralled around your plate to keep the wolf from the door, and when it comes to clothes, you don’t have to go to a tailor, or a hand me down store, and take something you don’t want because it is cheap, but you take any clothes that are sent in by charitable people, which have been worn enough so there is no style about them, and no newness to wear off by rolling in the grass, and you put them on and let it go at that, if they do smell of moth balls.
Pa has skipped and I am left alone and I shall enter as a freshman in an Orphan Asylum, and later go out into the world and travel on my shape.
Pa took me to Washington and for a week he was visiting the different Departments, and nights he would talk in his sleep about air ships and balloons, and forts and battleships, and about going abroad, until I thought he was getting nutty.