How sad a thing it is to part with boyhood forever; and yet how many do so without a sigh or a regret! It is only in after years that they wake up to understand how great was their loss. Some, well aware that the hour has come for boyhood to bid them farewell, turn to look after it fondly, even when their feet are set on the new road that manhood has led them into. Good-by, happy boyhood! this is the final parting; we shall never meet again. Of course, it’s a grand thing to be a man, but it’s only after we have become men that we realize how grand it was to be a boy.
The senior has been playing at being a man. He has carried a sober face, his manner has been sedate, and he has been very much impressed with his own importance. All this has begun to wear upon him, and with the awakening of spring he wakes up also to a knowledge of what is happening. By Jove! it’s a serious thing, after all, to permit boyhood to drift away without so much as a word of farewell. This hits him hard, and he suddenly stretches out his hands to that part of himself that he has so carelessly thrust aside.
Behold a lot of dignified Yale seniors wooing back their boyhood on a sunny spring day. You’d scarcely know them now. There in one group are Aldrich, who carried off the honors as a drum-major in the political rally last fall; Tomlinson, widely celebrated as a “greasy grind;” Browning, the laziest man on earth; Hodge, famous on the gridiron or the diamond, and Merriwell, famous the country over. And what are they doing?
Spinning tops! So help me, they are spinning tops!
But look around and you will see scores of well-known seniors engaged in the same surprising occupation. They enter into the spirit of if with the combined hilarity of boys and dignity of men. If you look beneath the surface, it may seem rather pathetic to witness this great crowd of intellectual young men seriously engaged in a last romp with their departing boyhood.
There is Porter, the famous poet of the Lit., frolicking down the walk, trundling a hoop before him with the apparent satisfaction of a lad of seven. See! his hoop collides with that of Gammel, the great Dwight Hall orator, and there is a general mixup. But they’re not real boys. They’re only men playing that they are boys. If they had been boys that collision might have resulted in an exchange of blows, instead of an exchange of bows.