With this image in view the narrator has laid extended stress upon an authentic study of child life. Maturing years have made it but too clear that only on such foundation, resting deep within the vast-moving and timeless heritage of Instinct and Intellect, might a valid superstructure be reared into the light of our day. Men in their fatuity believe that they cause replicas of themselves to be born of woman; that they create children like themselves for themselves. They are picturesquely unaware, in mass, that they are but instrumental, normally, in bringing forth full grown men and women whom they may never see, but who, it must be so, are in essence of being with them at birth, specifically differing from them. Hence the unceasing flood of child personalities, accepting or rejecting influences in an environment they had no share in making. Historically, and in mass, victims of Fate rather than Masters of Destiny. For Destiny and Fate alike have birth in what is accepted or rejected by the child.
With this digression as a commentary we may now resume in its natural course the story of a growing child well known to us, and proceed to extend that series of rejections and acceptances—beginning in his infancy—into an ever enlarging world of fact and fiction until we may perchance obtain a glimpse of what they really were, and of their significance in determining his onward drift—a drift that as yet has developed no self-defined momentum.
Shortly after their return to Boston from Newburyport, the father, for reasons of his own, whatever they were, decided to move his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were away six months.
A small boy stood on the dock at Eastport, Maine, holding in his hand a huge greengage plum. The same small boy suffered and saw the agonies of those who cross the Bay of Fundy. He saw and lived in a hotel in Halifax, where an Academy was opened. Later he endured in patience the terrible discipline of his father, who in below zero weather walked him for miles along the bleak “Northwest Arm,” to return with white cheeks and nose, only to be told to wash his face in snow—the father doing the like. He saw his gods blasting a deep trench for water pipe through the solid slate ledge, and again he marvelled at what men could do. He saw the great citadel crowning the heights, and from it, he viewed the harbor. Then came calamity. Mamma was taken down with diphtheria; and he saw the great and grand Newfoundland dog, that had welcomed them effusively on their arrival and had adopted them at once, lying day after day, night after night, faithfully guarding her chamber door. Mamma recovered; but her illness was prophetic of change.
In the spring they returned to Boston, and Louis was sent to live with his grandparents in South Reading, as before, with the proviso that he was to return to his parents in the fall. He became at once deeply immersed in the miniature activities of the farm, taking the initiative wherever he could, doing small things with large enthusiasm. He did not consider such things work, but joy. He was physically active and mentally active too. He was always excited in his work and always constructive. As Grandpa also worked, they became great pals, and planned and worked together. His natural surroundings became less mystical to him. He held them in affection, but no longer in dreamy wonder. The delicate bloom of early childhood was passing, while the vigor and aggressiveness of budding boyhood were rising as branches from the same deep root. His love of the open remained constant and intense. He was developing pride, ambition, and a sense of growing power over material things. The desire some day to exercise such power to the full became in him a definitive dream, within which, unnoticed, was resident the glow of a deeper power—a power that had suffused a swiftly-moving, vocal springtime, which he had seen and heard and lived in this same spot.
Grandpa did not bother about the child’s education, for, being wise, he knew the child was daily self-acquiring an education exactly suited to his temperament and years. But Grandmamma believed otherwise. She thought her grandson needed polish, and that he should now begin a systematic study of the French language. Louis was willing enough and started in gaily. He liked the sound, and the words in italics looked pretty; all went well for a while. As he got in deeper he began to be oppressed by the inanities of the grammar-book, and the imbecilities of a sort of first reader in which a waxwork father takes his wax children on daily promenades, explaining to them as they go, in terms of unctuous morality, the works of the Creator, and drawing therefrom, as from a spool, an endless thread of pious banalities. Louis rebelled. He declared he was an American boy!—that none of his playmates spoke French—why should he? Grandmamma, in habitual indulgence, discontinued polishing. She could not enter the child-mind. To her, her grandson was an object of boundless love—and little more; and yet this little more was an impassable gulf, lying as a chasm between old age gently petrifying in the thoughts of her own childhood, and a vigorous young animal with thoughts and an impetuous will of his own. And he in turn held his grandmamma to be the sweetest of mortals—and little more.
Thus summer passed on broad pinions sweeping, and Louis saw it moving thus. He saw such things. Beneath all the overlay the child was a mystic; inarticulate, wondering, believing. These fleeting revelations of Life came and went as interludes within the chosen practicalities of his realistic and material activity. He had rather help build a stone wall than listen to a poem—all except the fairy
