their sacrifice has been accepted, and that they have not lived and loved in vain. For it is, undoubtedly, a sacrifice that they offer, — a sacrifice to emotions highly wrought, to an ecstasy of enthusiasm suddenly overwhelming them and as suddenly departing, to the majesty of the train and its tumultuous passage.
Boys do not, it will be noticed, throw stones at passing wheelbarrows or at perambulators, or even at cabs. Neither the one nor the other excites sufficiently. They belong more to their own sphere and their own level in life, are viewed subjectively, and seem too commonplace for extraordinary attentions. The train and the steamboat, however, are abstract ideas, absorbing the human beings they carry into their own gigantic entity, so far removed from the boys’ own lives that they do not fall within the pale of ordinary ethics, and have to be viewed from a higher objective platform. Besides, the driver and guards of the train, being in a hurry, have no time to get down and catch the pelters, and therefore it is safe to pelt — so the boys think.
Whether magistrates have ever studied, or should study, the matter from any other than a police-court point of view I should hesitate to affirm. But in the ordinary cases where lads fling pebbles at a steamboat or train, their parents are fined, with the option of the culprits going to prison, and as the parents no doubt always give the urchins their full money’s worth in retribution, justice is probably dealt out all round fairly enough. The boys, it generally appears, hit “an elderly passenger” with one of the stones which they throw; and there matters culminate, as the original act of stone-throwing, had the missiles struck no one, might have passed by as a surviving remnant of some old pagan ceremony.
