“I’d really be the happiest boy alive!”
But Willie 1900 said (a present-century lad),
“I wish I’d lived five hundred years ago;
This spending time in school-rooms—oh, I wouldn’t have to do,
For then these things they didn’t have to know!
It’s a nuisance reading history—they didn’t have much then,
And as for science—my! ’twas jolly fun,
For there wasn’t electricity or sound for boys to learn,—
The discoverers weren’t born—or hardly one!
I’d like to live as boys did ten hundred years ago,