arrier
separated me from any of the grosser faults of boyhood, for she never
let me go from her without her kiss, the clasp of her hand, and her
saying, "You will be a good boy, Floyd?"

Yes, I had been perfectly happy; and, as I say, it disturbed me to have
a doubt suggested that this full, complete existence of mine had not
filled my mother's heart as well. Belfield--merely writing the word
"Belfield" has a breezy influence over my mind still. Wherever a man has
spent his boyhood there linger associations of the cool wind of the
hill-top, the sound of the sea audible yet invisible, the hush before a
storm, the tumbling of the ice in the river in the spring freshets, the
berries that grew on the edge of the wood, the ecstatic thrill of
physical strength and delight on the playground where he ran "drinking
in the wind of his own speed." But youth is the season not alone of
action, but of reverie. Most of our original thinking is done before we
are sixteen: after that we acquire so much of other men's experience
that our thoughts wear the current stamp. We come into our rich
inheritance of the world's accumulated knowledge, and evolve from it the
answers to the necessities of our own individual development. As boys we
were not cribbed by any exact logic and hard common sense, which must
stretch us a little later on a Procrustean bed, and we were free to grow
as we would and to stand on the highest level of noble thought and
heroic deed. The writers whom we read with avidity were those who
ennobled us: in those days youth was the era of a high romanticism, and
our authors did not enter the actual world which lay about us, giving us
pictures of real life, and with devilish ingenuity teaching us to regard
men's actions from the reverse side, and thus detect ignoble traits as
the mainspring of human achievement.

More than forty of us went to school together in the stiff white
academy which stood on the hill surrounded by a quadrangle of straight
poplars. We learned many things there--some from the grim old preceptor,
some outside the walls. I had a volume of Plutarch, from which I used to
read stories to the boys as we lay on the grassy slopes in the shade,
and I often felt a tremor in my voice as I read. It seems to me
sometimes that the youth of this day lose some of the grandeur which
made our ideals. Our sons read "Oliver Optic" and the magazines, while
we used to thrill over the grand words of the men who have ruled t