With these sweet sentiments upon our lips we stand on the tallest tower of our castle in the air and with our politest bow toss a large sugar lump of greeting to every one who is wise enough to subscribe for BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE. Fly in Your Own Firmament. When downy-lipped youth first begins to peep through the knothole in the temple of knowledge, he is the happiest of all mortals because his vanity is unbridled and free. He knows it all. When he “orates” on commencement day he robs the gardens of rhetoric and twines their choicest flowers about the beautiful, but hollow and flimsy columns of his speech. He misquotes the classic poets and taxes the old philosophers with things they never said. He twists the tail of history, strangles science, and spouts wisdom never dreamed of by Solomon. His impassioned sentences are chains of gold with blazing diamonds strung, and his tropes and similes cavort like flaming meteors athwart the intellectual heavens. But after he leaves the classic halls of college, and after a few hard bumps against the rock walls of reality, and a few hard falls on the ice pond of experience, his self-conceit springs a leak, his immense learning oozes out, and his dream of kinship with the gods vanishes into the limbo of the forever forgotten like a sweet scent before a high wind. [Illustration: His vanity is un’ridled and free. ] And so runs the endless story of callow youth—a comedy of errors reenacted by each successive generation, in whose quips and cranks and boyish antics we see ourselves repeated as in a mirror, and we only laugh and wish that youth might last forever—we laugh and enjoy its beautiful vanities. But our laughter melts into sighs as we recall the Persian poet’s plaintive lines: “Ah! that spring should vanish with the rose, That youth’s sweet scented manuscript should close!” Time but dissipates each rapturous dream, and the revelation of our ignorance comes with the experience of riper years. Only once are we the proud possessors of all knowledge and all wisdom, and this is in the dreamy days of life’s happy morning. And yet, we never lose our self-conceit as we advance in years; we only adjust our vanity to the knowledge we acquire. We learn how to dodge some of the jagged walls of trouble and to avoid some of the mud holes of calamity; but vanity still lures us on in myriad paths of folly. Its most dangerous form is that which conjures in men the delusion that they know _everything_, and that they can turn from one field of effort to another without disturbing their equilibrium and gather fruits and flowers with equal success from all alike. This is the snag upon which so many little kites get hung.