Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BAFFLED BOY. A CCOKDING to the best scientific authorities – the small-boy becomes a boy at the age of sixteen. At that age he ought to put away small- boyish things, and to put on the bashful awkwardness of semi-intelligent boyhood. At all events, he ought to know that his presence is not desired by young men who come to see his sister. We do not expect this amount of intelligence in the small-boy, and it is often necessary to bribe him with candy or to persuade him with clubs before he will consent to treat his sister with common humanity; but the sixteen-year-old boy usually perceives when an area of courting, accompanied with gradually increasing pressure in the region of the waist and marked depression of the parlor gas, is about to set in, and thereupon discreetly, even if sneer- ingly, withdraws. Master Henry T. Johnson, of Warrensburg, Illinois, is a boy who has just reached the period of boyhood, and who is remarkably clever in the invention of traps. If you were to ask him to make you any variety of trap, from a rat-trap to a mantrap, he would satisfy your demand with promptness and skill. His father’s premises, both in doors and out, are infested with traps, and there is no style of animal inhabiting Warrensburg that has not been caught in one or another of these traps. On one morning, early in January, it is confidently asserted that no less than two cats, a tramp, a small dog, six chickens, and three small-boys were found in Mr. Johnson’s yard in the close embrace of a corresponding number of traps. The truth is the boy has real mechanical genius, and it is a great pity that he is totally lacking in modesty and a regard for the rights of others. Last fall a young man who had met Master Johnson’s sister at a picnic and escorted her home, was seized wi…