“Goin’ fishin’?” you demand bluffly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir!” In a word has he relegated you to your place. He knows you—knows that you have no fish-worms in your pocket, and that to match his mighty pole you have only a paltry jointed “rod.”
He pauses impatiently. He has little time to waste with you.
“Any good?”
“Yes, sir.”
Irksomely respectful, now with a wriggle he is off, onward into his magic realms, leaving you to gaze after, chastened, chagrined.
Oh, this hideous disguise—this iron metamorphosis which wizard Time, the inexorable, has laid upon you! There is no dropping it.
You turn to Nature; surely Nature has the acumen to recognize that you have grown not at all, save, perhaps, in stature. But the sun burns, the rain wets, the snow chills—each uncompromising and austere. The pond that once stretched away like an ocean shrinks and shallows at your coming, till you can almost step from bank to bank; the once limitless wood, as wild and as romantic as the Carpathians, mischievously contracts so that you can see through from side to side; the highroad is dusty, and the paths refuse to lead, but are finished in a stride. Everything conspires to remind you that you are foreign, Brobdingnagian, a personage apart, and that too late have you faced about.
To the pleasures and to the favors that were you have forfeited the “Open, sesame!”