Explore "Farmington" by Clarence Darrow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In Farmington the girls were of small account. Of course we had to tolerate them, for all of us had sisters, and then, too, we were told that we ought to treat them more kindly than the boys: but still we never really wanted them around.
The girls were much prettier than the boys, and they had on clean clothes, and generally shoes, and they wore red or blue ribbons around their necks and white or colored sashes around their waists, and their hair was combed and fixed in long twists and tied with ribbon every day; and it was almost always as smooth and nice at night as when they came to school in the morning. As for us boys, our mothers combed our hair in the morning before we went to school, and occasionally with a fine-tooth comb; and when we left home it was usually parted on the side, and had no snarls, and lay down smoothly on the top of our heads,-but of course it was different before we got home. Sometimes even on our way to school we would turn somersaults, or walk on our hands, or "skin a cat" on the limb of a tree, and then our caps would fall off and our hair get pretty badly mussed.