“Pipe the kelly!” meaning, observe the hat.
Then perhaps there is the very rude boy who asks whether the “rags” have been “rassled,” said enquiry being gently emphasised by a push from behind. In which case the young glass of fashion, having a gloomy premonition of what may happen to him at home if he returns bearing the marks of combat, backs discreetly off the firing-line, and retreats to his own dooryard with as small loss of dignity as the exigency of the occasion will permit. And he is pretty sure to stick there the remainder of the afternoon, while occasionally other boys, in regulation woollens or corduroys, peep at him curiously through the palings, making him feel like one of those unpronounceable animals that they keep in cages and lecture about at the zoo.
Do you think this characteristic of the boy really signifies that he is “notional”? Do you put it down merely as “finicality”? Then you do him a great injustice. In the true analysis it is quite the opposite. It is but one feature of a unique democracy, a splendid democracy that you will find holding sway wherever boys gather. Oh, this democracy of boyhood is a wonderful thing! To me it is the régime beautiful. There is something so inspiring about it! For here, in this quaint domain of dare-and-do, you see every sturdy little chap, regardless of clothes, creed or family position, standing on his own merits and judged by his own deeds.
Why some mothers persist in Little-Lord-Fauntleroy-ing their boys within an inch of their lives is to me a profound mystery. Can any mother enlighten me on the long-curls cruelty? Is it selfish vanity? Could any mother, for the mere gratification of an egoistic desire, be so unfeeling as to send her helpless boy out into the scene of humiliation and actual physical torture of which the boy with the long curls becomes the pitiable centre as soon as he turns the corner?
I do not like to think so. Rather would I believe, as in the case of the broken window, that the mother’s error is chargeable to her never having been a boy. She has a faulty conception of what it means to be yanked about by those boy-hated ringlets of gold, to be harassed and taunted by the inornate but happier hoi polloi.
I recall one afternoon when I took a youngster of three around to the barber’s to have him shorn. I returned with the boy in one hand and the curls in the other. He was magnificently cologned and wanted everybody to “smell it.”
The mother was waiting with an empty shoe-box in her lap. She was sitting by the window, in the soft half-light of the early evening, and she caressed the golden bronze ringlets before putting them away. And something glistened in her eye and it fell into the box and was packed away with the curls. I shouldn’t wonder if it were there yet, for somehow I can’t help thinking that a tear like that must crystallise into a tiny pearl and glisten on forever.
But when this mother looked up at the boy, she was smiling, almost proudly; and she patted the shiny, round head, and kissed it, cologne and all, and quoted a verse about having “lost a baby and gained a man,” declaring that he really looked much better than she had expected.
And the boy was put to bed and slept coolly and comfortably, and he’s had a clean scalp and a clear conscience ever since, I guess.