to keep warm. Plenty of good-natured hustle was going on in it. The hustle might have been ill-natured scuffle except for that spontaneous police which always keeps the peace and looks after fair-play in crowds that are not mobs. The brutal boys who would have pounded the weakly boys, and rendered them ineligible by black eyes and bloody noses, neutralized each other. Besides, emulation among so many could not develop into hostility. Every boy knew that he had only one fiftieth of one chance of success, and that each boy within reach had only a fiftieth. The natural dislike of competitors, subdivided into fractions with such a denominator, lost intensity, and expended itself in nudges of the elbows and shoves with the hips, instead of running down into the hands and electrifying them into pugilistic fists, or filling the boots with the idea, kick. It is not until two or three of a field distance the others, and are neck and neck within a dozen leaps of the winning-post, that hatred begins to expand in their souls, if they are hateful.
As Brightly had one boy to choose, and no time to spare to be philanthropic, he began to decimate the throng with his eye.
First, he rejected all who disdained or neglected the primal use of the pocket-handkerchief.
Second, he set aside all the irreclaimable ragamuffins.
Third, he counted out those who would be constitutionally unsavory.
