If I were writing this story as I feel to-day, and if I could not recall the little child who had so lately come from the great heart of Nature that he still must have remembered what she felt and thought and knew, I might not regret those broken childish joys. I might rather mourn and lament, with all the teachers and parents and authors, that I was so profligate of my time when I was yet a child, and that I was not more studious in those far-off years. But as I look back to my childhood days, my sluggish heart beats quicker, and I can feel the warm young blood rush to my tingling feet and hands, and I realize once more the strange thrill of delight and joy that life and activity alone bring to all the young. And so I cling to-day to the childish thought that I was right and my poor father wrong. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things,” said the apostle twenty centuries ago. The mistake of maturity and age has ever been that it lives so wholly in the present and so completely forgets the childhood that is past. To guard infancy and youth as a precious heritage, to keep them as long as we can, seems to me the true philosophy of life. For, after all, life is mostly illusions, and the illusions of infancy and childhood and youth are more alluring than those of later years. But I fancy now that I can understand my father’s thoughts. A strange fate had set him down beside the little winding creek and kept him at his humble task of tolling his neighbors’ grist. He looked at the high hills to the east, and at the high hills to the west, and up and down the narrow country road that led to the outside world. He knew that beyond the high hills was a broad inviting plain, with opportunity and plenty, with fortune and fame; but as he looked at the hills he could see no way to pass beyond. It is possible that he could have walked over them, or even around them, had he been alone; but there was the ever-growing brood that held him in the narrow place. No doubt as he grew older he often looked up and down the long dusty road, half expecting some fairy or genie to come along and take him away where he might realize his dreams; but of course no such thing ever happened,—for this is a real story,—and so he stayed and ground the grain in the old decaying mill.