This eBook edition has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Tom Bailey is born in the fictitious town of Rivermouth, New Hampshire, but moves to New Orleans with his family when he is still a baby. In his boyhood, his father wants him to be educated in the North and sent him back to school in Rivermouth to live with his grandfather, Captain Nutter. Tom becomes a member of a boys' club called the Centipedes and the boys become involved in a series of adventures. In one prank, the boys steal an old carriage and push it into a bonfire for the Fourth of July. During the winter, several boys build a snow fort on Slatter's Hill, inciting rival boys into a battle of snowballs. Later, Tom and three other boys combine their money to buy a boat named Dolphin and sneak away to an island. Tom also befriends a man nicknamed Sailor Ben. Revealed as the long-lost husband of Captain Nutter's Irish servant, Ben settles in Rivermouth in a boat-like cabin. Sailor Ben helps the boys fire off a series of old cannon at the pier, much to the confusion of the local townspeople. When his father's banking job fails, Tom is invited by an uncle to work in a counting-house in New York. "The Story of a Bad Boy" is an autobiographical novel by American writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich, fictionalizing his experiences as a boy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is considered the first in the "bad boy" genre of literature, though the text's opening lines admit that he was "not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy".