Jasper County Democrat, Volume 9, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1906 — The Sweethearts of a Boy. [ARTICLE]

The Sweethearts of a Boy.

Love and the mating instinct come early to the boy. I was scarcely six and Just beginning .school when I formed an attachment for Nellie Grant (which wasn’t her name at all, but one I supply for personal reasons) and longed for the time when I would be a man and could carry her home to mother. I didn’t think, in those days, of having an independent establishment of my own. The love for my mother was too great to permit any premeditation of a nest without her. Nellie was a blue-eyed sweetheart, of happy face, red lips and light-brown curls. She said “Good morning,’’ shyly at the schoolhouse gate and shrank from my boyish roughness, which is always the mask of boy love. I worshiped her so truly that I stoutly maintained her as my preference when my aunt joked me about her and the boys twitted me of "having a girl.” As time passed, I grew bolder, but Nellie seemed always afraid of me and when, one day in an outburst of affection, I pulled her pig-tail, yelled “Hi,” and ran away to hide my embarrassment, and she cried, I was besieged by grief and baffled by Cupid. This was the extent of our lovemaking. Nellie soon grew away from me, and while I was still adoring her, acquired a real beau who walked home with her one night from the schoolhouse. Awful season of unrequited love, I feel thy blasting influence still! And then, it seems but yesterday, Nellie ran away with a ne’er-do-well and married him. She came back alone in a year or two, when I was in my baseball epoch, and took in plain sewing to support herself and child. He had deserted her. Back yonder in beautiful Riverside a grassy mound marks where she sleeps and covers all but memory of that first sweetheart of mine. Over the grave birds carol and the elm trees throw their silhouetted shade. A stone’s throw away the Cedar laps upon the shore and sings a crooning lullaby to those who slumber in the City of the Dead. God rest her. She was a pure dewdrop in Life's ocean of brine, a spring anemone in the heart-garden of love.