mself to ask a perfectly simple question
about some small matter of common interest is comparatively rare; and
yet it is generally the simplest way out of the difficulty.

IX

FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE

Now with all the tremors, reactions, glooms, shadows, and despairs of
youth--it is easy enough to forget them, but they were there--goes a
power of lifting and lighting up in a moment at a chord of music, a
glance, a word, the song of a bird, the scent of a flower, a flying
sunburst, which fills life up like a cup with bubbling and sparkling
liquor.

"My soul, be patient! Thou shalt find
A little matter mend all this!"

And that is the part of youth which we remember, till on looking back
it seems like a time of wandering with like-hearted comrades down some
sweet-scented avenue of golden sun and green shade. Our memory plays us
beautifully false--splendide mendax--till one wishes sometimes that old
and wise men, retelling the story of their life, could recall for the
comfort of youth some part of its languors and mischances, its bitter
jealousies, its intense and poignant sense of failure.

And then in a moment the door of life opens. One day I was an
irresponsible, pleasure-loving, fantastic youth, and a week later I
was, or it seemed to me that I was, a professional man with all the
cares of a pedagogue upon my back. It filled me at first, I remember,
with a gleeful amazement, to find myself in the desk, holding forth,
instead of on the form listening. It seemed delicious at first to have
the power of correcting and slashing exercises, and placing boys in
order, instead of being corrected and examined, and competing for a
place. It was a solemn game at the outset. Then came the other side of
the picture. One's pupils were troublesome, they did badly in
examinations, they failed unaccountably; and one had a glimpse too of
some of the tragedies of school life. Almost insensibly I became aware
that I had a task to perform, that my mistakes involved boys in
disaster, that I had the anxious care of other destinies; and thus,
almost before I knew it, came a new cloud on the horizon, the cloud of
anxiety. I could not help seeing that I had mismanaged this boy and
misdirected that; that one could not treat them as ingenuous and lively
playthings, but that what one said and did set a mark which perhaps
could not be effaced. Gradually other doubts and problems made
themselves felt. I had to administer a syste