ood;
and you love your friends, or seem to, far more dearly than you ever
loved them before; and you forgive the boy who provoked you to that sad
fall from the oak, and you forgive him all his wearisome teasings. But
you cannot forgive yourself for some harsh words that you have once
spoken to Charlie; still less can you forgive yourself for having once
struck him in passion with your fist. You cannot forget his sobs
then;--if he were only alive one little instant to let you
say,--"Charlie, will you forgive me?"

Yourself you cannot forgive; and sobbing over it, and murmuring "Dear,
dear Charlie!" you drop into a troubled sleep.

V.

_Boy Religion._

Is any weak soul frightened, that I should write of the Religion of the
boy? How indeed could I cover the field of his moral or intellectual
growth, if I left unnoticed those dreams of futurity and of goodness,
which come sometimes to his quieter moments, and oftener to his hours of
vexation and trouble? It would be as wise to describe the season of
Spring with no note of the silent influences of that burning Day-god
which is melting day by day the shattered ice-drifts of Winter,--which
is filling every bud with succulence, and painting one flower with
crimson, and another with white.

I know there is a feeling--by much too general as it seems to me--that
the subject may not be approached except through the dicta of certain
ecclesiastic bodies, and that the language which touches it must not be
that every-day language which mirrors the vitality of our thought, but
should have some twist of that theologic mannerism, which is as cold to
the boy as to the busy man of the world.

I know very well that a great many good souls will call levity what I
call honesty, and will abjure that familiar handling of the boy's lien
upon Eternity which my story will show. But I shall feel sure, that, in
keeping true to Nature with word and with thought, I shall in no way
offend against those highest truths to which all truthfulness is
kindred.

You have Christian teachers, who speak always reverently of the Bible;
you grow up in the hearing of daily prayers; nay, you are perhaps taught
to say them.

Sometimes they have a meaning, and sometimes they have none. They have a
meaning when your heart is troubled, when a grief or a wrong weighs upon
you: then the keeping of the Father, which you implore, seems to come
from the bottom of your soul; and your eye suffuses with such t