Boy Life: Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean HowellsHowells, William Dean
General
Boy Life: Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells
Howells, William Dean
Boys
There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would
easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had
been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little
sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some
great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they
are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys,
but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully
rounded out with all a boy's interests and pleasures, and he is glad
that his lines were cast in the Boy's Town; but he knows, or believes he
knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him
then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his
home in it was happy. The town was small, and the boys there were hemmed
in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large
with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely
bright with a father's reason and warm with a mother's love.
THE END
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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