and positively: "Now, I
can't let you go. No, Willie. That's the end of it. You can't go." Even
those, I say, hoped against hope. It simply could not be that what the
human heart so ardently longed for should be denied by a loving father.
This same conviction applies to other things, even when we are grown up.
It is against nature and the constituted scheme of things that we cannot
have what we want so badly. (And, in general, it may be said that we can
have almost anything we want, if we only want it hard enough. That's the
trouble with us. We don't want it hard enough.) We boys lay there in
the shade and pulled the long stalks of grass and nibbled off the sweet,
yellow ends, as we dramatized miracles that could happen just as well as
not, if they only would, consarn 'em! For instance, you might be going
along the street, not thinking of anything but how much you wanted to go
to the circus, and how sorry you were because you hadn't the money, and
your daddy wouldn't give you any; and first thing you 'd know, you 'd
stub your toe on something, and you'd look down and there'd be a half a
dollar that somebody had lost--Gee! If it would only be that way! But we
knew it wouldn't, because only the other Sunday, Brother Longenecker had
said: "The age of miracles is past." So we had to give up all hopes. Oh,
it's terrible. Just terrible!

But some of the boys lay there in the grass with their hands under their
heads, looking up at the sky, and making little white spots come in and
out on the corners of their jaws, they had their teeth set so hard,
and were chewing so fiercely. You could almost hear their minds creak,
scheming, scheming, scheming. I suppose there were ways for boys to make
money in those times, but they always fizzled out when you came to try
them, to say nothing of the way they broke into your day. Why, you had
scarcely any time to play in. You 'd go 'round to some neighbor's house
with a magazine, and you'd say: "Good afternoon, Mrs. Slaymaker. Do you
want to subscribe for this?" Just the way you had studied out you would
say. And she'd take it, and go sit down with it, and read it clear
through while you played with the dog, and then when she got all through
with it, and had read all the advertisements, she'd hand it back to you
and say: No, she didn't believe she would. They had so many books and
papers now that she didn't get a chance hardly to read in any of them,
let alone taking any new ornes. Were you