The year’s end is for the young. Such is the order of the world, the universal paradox. Opposite seeks opposite. And _we_ were young once,--a good while ago,--and for us, also, winter was a bright and busy season, its days all too short and too few. I speak of “week-days,” be it understood. As for winter Sundays, in an unwarmed meeting-house (though the sermon might be like the breath of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace), we should have been paragons of early piety, beings too good to live, if we had wished the hours longer. Let their miseries be forgotten. On week-days, once out of school, we wasted no time. We knew where we were going, and we went on the run. We were boys, not men. Some of us, at least, were not yet infected with the idea that we ever should be men. We aspired neither to men’s work nor to men’s pleasures. We aimed not at self-improvement. We thought not of getting rich. We might recite “Excelsior” in the schoolroom, but it did us no harm; our innocence was incorruptible. Two things we did: we skated, and we slid down-hill. There was always either snow or ice. The present demoralization of the seasons had not yet begun. Winter was winter. Snowdrifts were over your head, and ice was three feet thick. And zero--for boys who slept in attics to which no particle of artificial heat ever penetrated, zero was something like summer. Young America was tough in those days. I recall at this moment the bitterly cold day when one of our number skated into an airhole on Whitman’s Pond. It was during the noon recess. His home was a mile or more east of the pond, and the schoolhouse was at least a mile west of the pond. He sank into the water up to his chin, and saved himself with difficulty, the airhole luckily being small and the ice firm about the edges. What would a twentieth-century boy do under such circumstances? I can only guess. But I know what Charles H. did. He came back to the schoolhouse first, to make his apologies to the master; I can see him now, as he came in smiling, looking just a little foolish; then he ran home--three miles, perhaps--to change his clothing. And he is living still. Oh, yes, we were tough,--or we died young.