It was a proud, aspiring thought, That should have been exiled:-- I wish I was more humble now Than when I was a child.
I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself, just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again: perhaps he meditated matrimony.
For my own part I cannot successfully wish to be a boy; I remain impervious to all the efforts of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States to dim my eye; and there must be many another eye like mine, or else it is unbelievably unique. I lean back in my chair, close my undimmed eye, and do my best; but, contrary to all editorial expectation, I can summon no desire to go barefooted, fish with a bent pin, or revisit the old swimming-hole
Where the elm and the chestnut o'ershadowed the bowl, And tempered the hot summer weather.
I prefer a beach and a bathing-suit and somebody my own age. Yet do not think, shocked reader, that I am unsympathetic with youth. I am more sympathetic--that is all--with my contemporaries; and the thought forces itself upon me that boyhood is a narrow and conventional period, in which my own desire to go without shoes was exactly similar to my mother's determination to wear a bustle. Equally anxious to follow the fashion of our respective sets, neither understood the other; and I would no more have worn a bustle than my mother would have gone barefooted. My father, similarly thwarted in a single desire, would have cared less: his wider interests--politics, business, family, the local and world gossip that immersed him in his newspaper, art, literature, music, and the drama, to say nothing of professional baseball and pugilism (in which, however, many fathers and sons have a common interest)--would have absorbed his disappointment.
But my narrower world, so to speak, was all feet. An unconventional boy, as I think the most erudite student of boy-life and boy-psychology will admit, is much more rare than an unconventional man; and even then his unconventionality is likely to be imposed upon him "for his own good" by well-meaning but tyrannical parents. "I have known boys," wrote Uncle Jones, observing but not comprehending this characteristic fact, "when playing at 'Hare and hounds' and 'Follow my leader,' to scramble over hedges, leap over brooks, and mount up precipices, in a manner which they would not have dared to attempt, had it not been for the examples set them by their school-fellows; but," he adds, "I do not remember any instance of a boy imitating another on account of his good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety."