ur own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of
what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had
nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference
between you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming difference
that flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, and makes
you think you are a remarkable fellow.

There is a difference between boys and men, but it is a difference of
self-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do everything because he does not
know he cannot; a man wants to do something because he knows he cannot
do everything; a boy always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds because
the man knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boy
because he knows better; he has learned by experience that what is a
harm to others is a greater harm to himself, and he would rather not do
it. But a boy hardly knows what harm is, and he does it mostly without
realizing that it hurts. He cannot invent anything, he can only imitate;
and it is easier to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but how
are you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure in
contriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a wasp's
camp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if you do not, then
nothing at all happens. If you set a dog to chase a cat up a tree, then
something has been done; but if you do not set the dog on the cat, then
the cat just lies in the sun and sleeps, and you lose your time. If a
boy could find out some way of doing good, so that he could be active in
it, very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he cannot,
he very seldom wants to do good.

Or at least he did not want to do good in my boy's time. Things may be
changed now, for I have been talking of boys as they were in the Boy's
Town forty years ago. For anything that I really know to the contrary,
a lot of fellows when they get together now may plot good deeds of all
kinds, but when more than a single one of them was together then they
plotted mischief. When I see five or six boys now lying under a tree on
the grass, and they fall silent as I pass them, I have no right to say
that they are not arranging to go and carry some poor widow's winter
wood into her shed and pile it neatly up for her, and wish to keep it a
secret from everybody; but forty years ago I should have had good reason
for thinking that they were debating how to tie a pi