[VIII]
OUT INTO THE WORLD
A young man of my acquaintance, who had just finished his schooling, came to his father one morning, flushed with pride, and holding an open letter in his hand.
“Father,” he said, “I’ve got a situation, and the man says I may start to work in the morning.”
The father took the letter and read it.
“Do you know all about this man?” he asked.
“Do I know him? Why, no; I don’t know him at all. But he knows all about me. He looked up all my references.”
“Of course he did,” replied the father, putting the letter into his pocket; “and before you go to work for him I’m going to look up his.”
It was a homely, up-state father who said that, but he was a wise and a good man and I revere him. He was a father who knew the boy from the skin in. He knew that the boy’s first employer is, in the boy’s eyes, the greatest man in the world. He perceived that his son, who for twenty years had looked upon him, the father, as the man of men, was about to have set before him a new pattern, a new ideal. And out of his heart came the question:
“What is this man like?”
It is a fine thing to know that you have brought your boy through that plastic period between his cradle-hood and his majority, and to know when he comes of age that he is clean and straight and true. It must be gratifying indeed, when the last text-book is closed and laid away, to see him start into the world, a man grown, with keen aspirations and high ideals, ready and eager to grapple with the world on his own account, and capable of taking care of himself with his own hands.