It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy it; I am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot boy, even if circumstances were against him and his mother as adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that time then seems to be without limit; and this comfortable, unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. One forgets how cruelly slow moved the hands of the school-room clock through the last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen minutes of the daily life-sentence. One forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when one's little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for stout heart to play "hookey," and to lure the finny tribe with a poor worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always did. But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake those feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or other, though the bell had stopped ringing, get unostentatiously into our little seats before it stopped. And so we ran, and ran, and ran, lifting one leaden foot after the other with hopeless determination, in a silent, nightmare world where the road was made of glue and the very trees along the way turned their leaves to watch us drag slowly by. Little respect we would have had then for the poet Byron and his "Ah! happy years! once more, who would not be a boy?"
But even when time seemed to stand still, or go too fast, we had no consciousness that the complicated clock of our individual existence could ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this treasure, that we often wished to be men! "When I was young," says the author of "The Boy's Week-Day Book,"--another volume that is not read nowadays as much as it used to be,--
I doubted not the time would come, When grown to man's estate, That I would be a noble 'squire, And live among the great.