-day of triumph, and then they will astonish the Church
and the world; but they find that faculties too long hidden are faculties
ruined. Better for an egg to have succeeded in making one plain cake for a
poor man's table than to have failed in making a banquet for the House of
Lords.

That was a glad time when on Easter morning the eggs went into the
saucepan, and came out striped, and spotted, and blue, and yellow, and the
entire digestive capacity of the children was tested. You have never had
anything so good to eat since. You found the eggs. You hid them. They were
your contribution to the table. Since then you have seen eggs scrambled,
eggs poached, eggs in omelet, eggs boiled, eggs done on one side and eggs
in a nog, but you shall never find anything like the flavor of that Easter
morning in boyhood.

Alas for the boys in town! Easter comes to them on stilts, and they buy
their eggs out of the store. There is no room for a boy to swing round.
There is no good place in town to fly a kite, or trundle a hoop, or even
shout without people's throwing up the window to see who is killed. The
holidays are robbed of half their life because some wiseacre will persist
in telling him who Santa Claus is, while yet he is hanging up his first
pair of stockings. Here the boy pays half a dollar for a bottle of perfume
as big as his finger, when out of town, for nothing but the trouble of
breathing it, he may smell a country full of new-mown hay and wild
honeysuckle. In a painted bath-tub he takes his Saturday bath careful lest
he hit his head against the spigot, while in the meadow-brook the boys
plunge in wild glee, and pluck up health and long life from the pebbly
bottom. Oh, the joy in the spring day, when, after long teasing of mother
to let you take off your shoes, you dash out on the cool grass barefoot, or
down the road, the dust curling about the instep in warm enjoyment, and,
henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes to tie or blacken.

Let us send the boys out into the country every year for an airing. If
their grandfather and grandmother be yet alive, they will give them a good
time. They will learn in a little while the mysteries of the hay-mow, how
to drive oxen and how to keep Easter. They will take the old people back to
the time when you yourself were a boy. There will be for the grandson an
extra cake in each oven. And grandfather and grandmother will sit and watch
the prodigy, and wonder if any other fami