In the world of nature and humanity, is there such an embodiment of contradictions and absurdities as a youth in his transit from the dreamland of boyhood to the battle-field of manhood, through a region partaking of both, and abounding with strange products of its own? I am not speaking of the average boy, such boys as make up the male mass of the world--the undreaming, unthinking, plodding, drudging, sweating herd, whose few old commonplace, well-worn ideas don't possess the power of reproduction, and whose thoughts are thirteenth or thirteen hundredth-handed, and transmitted unimpregnated to other dullards, and whose life and spirit is that of the young animal merely--but a real young man, one of possibilities, intended for a man, and not merely for a male, one in whom the primitive forces of nature are planted, and who may develop into a new driving or forming power. What a mad, impulsive, freaky thing it is! You may see him bruising his still soft head a score of times against the impossible, and he will still contend that he can do it. He will spring frantically up the face of an unclimbable precipice, as the young salmon leaps up a cataract, and die in the faith that he can go up it. Oh, sublime faith! Oh, sublime folly! What strides he is constantly taking to the ridiculous, and not always from the sublime! How strong! how weak! How wise! how foolish! Consistent only in folly, and steady in the purpose of being foolish. How beautiful, and how ugly! What a lovable, detestable, desirable, proud, wilful, arrogant, supercilious, laughing, passionate, tender, cruel, loving, hating, good sort of a good-for-nothing he is! He believes everything--he believes nothing; and, like Mary's Son, questions and mocks the doctors to their beards in the very temple. Patience! he must have his time, and room to grow in, develop, and shape out. Let him have coral for his teeth, and climbing, and running, and jumping for his muscle. No man may love him, and no woman but his mother, and she is to be tried to the extent of endurance. Wait for him; he will, with or without your help, turn out good or bad, and in either event people will say: "I always told you so," "I always knew it was in him"; and cite a score of unhappened things in proof of their sagacity. Barton was one of these; neither better nor worse, full of possibilities and capabilities, impulsive, rash, and unreasoning. He has just made a resolve, and will act upon it; proud and sensitive to a degree, he had heard a word of fault once at the store, which another word would have explained. He would not say it, and went. It was discovered that the fault was not his, in time for him to remain; but he left without that word. He is willing to take his chances, and must speak and act for himself.