When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

YOU AT SCHOOL

NOW and again you dream one special dream. Suddenly you find yourself back in school. There you are, a great awkward man, squeezing into the old familiar seat and essaying some strangely mixed-up lesson. And about you are the mates of yore, who have not, apparently, grown a bit.

Although they seem not to notice anything peculiar in your presence, nevertheless your position is decidedly embarrassing to you. You feel that you must mind the teacher, of course, and yet you cannot, for the life of you, get that lesson! What a gawk you are! And how in the world are you ever going to stand this awful reversal?

Then you awaken, and with a sigh of relief discover yourself, in the gray of the morning, safely brought down to date, in your bed.

And once more you sigh, but this time not in relief. It is a sigh tenderly laid by retrospection upon the urn of the past.

In your dream the schoolroom was unusually small, and your seat was constricted to the extent that your knees were tightly pressed against the under side of the desk, while the edge of it was creasing your stomach. However, probably it was not that the room and the seat had shrunk; it was that you had expanded beyond limits.

In the days when it was quite proper that you should be in school, the room was extensive indeed, and the seat was ample for innumerable wriggles. For instance, it permitted you to slide down until, reaching forward with your two feet, you engaged the insteps of Billy Lunt, and hauling back with all your might, deliciously held him so that he could move only from the waist upward. Abruptly you released him, and his feet dropped with a big thump that made the teacher frown.

This seat and desk was your little state, surrounded by other little states similar to it, and all ruled by “teacher,” who, like some Pallas Athena, from her Olympia platform surveyed and appraised, bade and forbade.

Your state was bounded on the rear by Snoopie Mitchell’s, on the front by Billy Lunt’s, on the right and the left by a river, or aisle, such as at regular intervals divided the country and opened up the interior to travel.

This was a country of equal suffrage; some of the states were feminine, some were masculine. All, but especially the masculine, were liable to internal troubles, produced through external agencies.