Benjy was a bad boy. His name was Benjamin, but he was always called Benjy. He looked like something ending in jy or gy, or rather dgy, such as podgy. Indeed he was podgy, and moreover smudgy, having that cloudy, slovenly look (like a slate smudged instead of washed) which is characteristic of people whose morning toilet is not so thorough as it should be.

Boys are very nice creatures. Far be it from us to think, with some people, that they are nuisances to be endured as best may be till they develop into men. An intelligent and modest boy is one of the most charming of companions. As to an obliging boy (that somewhat rare but not extinct animal), there is hardly a limit to his powers of usefulness; or anything—from emigrating to a desert island to cleaning the kitchen clock—that one would not feel justified in undertaking with his assistance, and free access to his pocket stores.

Then boys’ wholesale powers of accumulation and destruction render their dens convenient storehouses of generally useless and particularly useful lumber. If you want string or wire, or bottles or flower-pots, or a bird-cage, or an odd glove or shoe, or anything of any kind to patch up something of a similar kind, or missing property of your own or another’s—go to a boy’s room! There one finds abundance of everything, from cobbler’s wax to the carmine from one’s own water-color box.

(One is apt to recognize old acquaintances, and one occasionally reclaims their company!)

All things are in a more or less serviceable condition, and at the same time sufficiently damaged to warrant appropriation to the needs of the moment. One suffers much loss at boys’ hands from time to time, and it is trying to have dainty feminine bowers despoiled of their treasures; but there are occasions when one spoils the spoiler!

Then what admirable field naturalists boys can make! They are none the worse for nocturnal moth hunts, or for wading up a stream for a Batrachosperma, or for standing in a pond pressing recruits for the fresh-water aquarium. A “collection” more or less is as nothing in the vast chaos of their possessions, though some scrupulous sister might be worried to find “a place for it.” And Fortune (capricious dame!) is certainly fond of boys, and guides some young “harum-scarum” to a habitat that has eluded the spectacles of science. And their cuttings always grow!

Then as to boys’ fun; within certain limits, there is no rough-and-ready wit to be compared with it.

Thus it is a pity that some boys bring a delightful class into disrepute—boys who are neither intelligent, modest, obliging, nor blest with cultivated tastes—boys who kick animals, tease children, sneer at feminine society, and shirk any company that is better than their own—boys, in short, like Benjy, who at one period of his career did all this, and who had a taste for low company, too, and something about his general appearance which made you think how good for him it would be if he could be well scrubbed with hot and soft soap both inside and out.

But Benjy’s worst fault, the vice of his character, was cruelty to animals. He was not merely cruel with the thoughtless cruelty of childhood, nor with the cruelty which is a secondary part of sport, nor with the occasional cruelty of selfishness or ill-temper. But he had that taste for torture, that pleasure in other creatures’ pain, which does seem to be born with some boys. It is incomprehensible by those who have never felt the hateful temptation, and it certainly seems more like a fiendish characteristic than a human infirmity.

Benjy was one of three children, and the only boy. He had two little sisters, but they were younger than himself, and he held them in supreme contempt. They were nice, merry little things, and many boys (between teasing, petting, patronizing, and making them useful) would have found them companionable enough, at any rate for the holidays. But Benjy, as I have said, liked low company, and a boy with a taste for low company seldom cares for the society of his sisters. Benjy thought games stupid; he never touched his garden (though his sisters kept it religiously in order during his absence at school); and as to natural history, or reading, or any civilizing pursuit, such matters were not at all in Benjy’s line.

But he was proud of being patronized by Tom, the coachman’s scapegrace son—a coarse, cruel, and uneducated lad, whose ideas of “fun” Benjy unfortunately made his own. With him he went to see pigs killed, helped to drown supernumerary pups and kittens, and became learned in dog-fights, cock-fights, rat-hunting, cat-hunting, and so forth.

Benjy’s father was an invalid, and he had no brothers, so that he was without due control and companionship. His own lack of nice pursuits made the excitement of cruelty an acceptable amusement for his idleness, and he would have thought it unmanly to be more scrupulous and tender-hearted than the coachman’s son.

The society of this youth did not tend to improve Benjy’s manners, and indeed he was very awkward in the drawing-room. But he was talkative enough in the stable, and rather a hero amongst the village boys who stoned frogs by the riverside, in the sweet days of early summer.

Truly Benjy had little in common with those fair, grey-eyed, demure little maidens, his sisters. As one of them pathetically said, “Benjy does not care for us, you know, because we are only girls, so we have taken Nox for our brother.”