Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1883 — The Far-Beaching Boy-Life. [ARTICLE]

The Far-Beaching Boy-Life.

The boyish impulses and the boyish actions that come to the full-grown man, come to him unsought, unpremeditated, genuine surprises. So came the latest action of my boyish days to me. Renewing my youth with the Prince, whose father I am. I sought the blackberry that scratches the hand which feeds; with careless hand I plucked the humble poison-vine, Twenty-five years ago I would have recognized that vine across a ten-acre field, through two haystacks, a line fence and a cow-barn. Now, alas, it took me ten hours to recognize it! And then only by its fruits did I know it. It got in its work fust as it did in the “Golden, olden glory of the days gone by. ” It clung to my fingers with a burning grasp; the longer it held the more ft burned. I recognized tne. old companion of my childhood. I knew it hafl come to stay. It is here now. It is a. howling swell. But I will kno# a poribh-Vine the next time I hunt for July greens. My hand offends me, yet I do not “put it off and cast it into the fire.” It bums merrily enough where itfis. ’'' ' ' And it makes me feel boyish to go out and get poisoned in this old, innocent way of unsuspicious childhood. It takes a long time for a man to grow out of his boyhood. I do not know just how long, but I should judge about 2,000 years. I place the limit at 2,000, because I think by that time a man would be too infirm by reason of age to get into any more mischief or misery. I have no acquaintance with men who have passed the ninetieth mile-stone on life’s pilgrimage, and verily it seems to me that all these meh are but boys. The man whips his own boy, because the youngster cannot keep 100 commandments as easily as his father can break ten. He operates in stocks just as he used to play marbles. He trades horses just as he used to “swap” knives; cheating or being cheated in every deal He sows wheat, and when he asks nature for bread she gives him chinch bug. He cries for corn and she fires a mullien-stalk at him. He plants a pansy bed, nature turns it into a cutworm pasture. He goes out under the blue skies, breathing the pure air of heaven, laughing to hear the birds sing, holding the hand of an innocent, loving child, reaches for a harmless blackberry and gets poisoned for another month. While the scoundrel who stayed in the lager-beer saloon only got ten days and the delirium tremens. Thus the native hue of resolution is sickbed o’er with the pale cast of poison oak. And all man’s sweet determination to regard this planet as an artist proof of heaven turned into sour distraction and doubt by a miserable handful of fivefingered ivy.— Robert J. Burdette.