My new love's smile, (for she only deigns to smile upon
me and seldom speaks), enthralls me, I cannot express myself; I follow
her about like a dog.

There is a plant called Boy Love because it never comes to fruition,
seldom blooms. It is almost extinct save in old neglected house-yards.
My gardener allows me to cultivate it in an uncherished corner of one of
her beds. I can never pass it without plucking a spray of its fragrant
leaves. Its very smell is of other days and ancient gardens. The
fashionable rose cannot endure it. I mean sometime to disprove its
impotence and entice it into flowering for the encouragement of little
boy lovers that they be not ashamed of their infantile, ardent
attachments but bravely confess them as I do.

This phase of young life passes like so many others. How swiftly they
pass! and must, since we have in ten years to rehearse all the parts for
the next fifty. In due time my girl playmate and also the young woman
were married, and meeting long afterward we found nothing in common, not
even a memory. One had forgotten that we ever played together; the other
laughed incredulously at the boyish attachment. At length I too forget
these mere matrons; I remember only the little maid and the coquette of
twenty-three.

As one climbs the sides of a mountain it lowers its crest, but the view
becomes extended. The hills of Mendon diminished as often as I climbed
other hills or succeeded in reaching the topmost spires of taller trees.
They were no longer so lofty, so distant, so infatuating. The walls of
my world were expanded on two sides, the south and the west. All unknown
lands were on the north. China was there, which to me was a place where
they did nothing but fly kites; so much I remembered from my geography
book; there too was Boston, merely a place where we sold our
huckleberries in summer. I had been as far as Mendon and found that the
world did not end there, nor were there any hills even. They had moved
themselves to the next horizon whitherto my fancies had flown.
Disillusions increased with my height. A yardstick no longer measured to
the top of my head; the score is now marked upon the jambs of the cellar
door, and sometimes I cheat with yarn balls in the heels of my boots. I
cannot grow fast enough to keep pace with my ambition. When I am larger,
when I am a man, then I shall--could one but recover the predicate of
those phrases! There is a cell in my brain as yet filled with not