d at the last
moment by some one putting a mirror to his lips and finding a little
blur of mist on it. Sometimes when he was beginning to try to write
things and to imagine characters, if he imagined a character's dying,
then he became afraid he was that character, and was going to die.

Once, he woke up in the night and found the full moon shining into his
room in a very strange and phantasmal way, and washing the floor with
its pale light, and somehow it came into his mind that he was going to
die when he was sixteen years old. He could then only have been nine or
ten, but the perverse fear sank deep into his soul, and became an
increasing torture till he passed his sixteenth birthday and entered
upon the year in which he had appointed himself to die. The agony was
then too great for him to bear alone any longer, and with shame he
confessed his doom to his father. "Why," his father said, "you are in
your seventeenth year now. It is too late for you to die at sixteen,"
and all the long-gathering load of misery dropped from the boy's soul,
and he lived till his seventeenth birthday and beyond it without further
trouble. If he had known that he would be in his seventeenth year as
soon as he was sixteen, he might have arranged his presentiment
differently.

XVIII.

THE NATURE OF BOYS.

I TELL these things about my boy, not so much because they were peculiar
to him as because I think they are, many of them, common to all boys.
One tiresome fact about boys is that they are so much alike; or used to
be. They did not wish to be so, but they could not help it. They did not
even know they were alike; and my boy used to suffer in ways that he
believed no boy had ever suffered before; but as he grew older he found
that boys had been suffering in exactly the same way from the beginning
of time. In the world you will find a great many grown-up boys, with
gray beards and grandchildren, who think that they have been different
their whole lives through from other people, and are the victims of
destiny. That is because with all their growing they have never grown to
be men, but have remained a sort of cry-babies. The first thing you have
to learn here below is that in essentials you are just like every one
else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much
worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures,
it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite
yo