When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

Escape from this despotism of school, with its penalties and speaking and other disagreeable features, which combined to outweigh any possible advantages or profit, was always engaging in prospect, although apt to be unsatisfactory in realization.

You longed to be a man. You wondered how it would seem to walk about paying no attention whatsoever to the old bell. Were the people outside the school aware of their fortunate state? Gee!

“‘A SOLDIER OF THE LEGION LAY DYING IN ALGIERS’”

It was an odd fact that in the week the finest and most interesting days, out of doors, habitually were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—and Sunday. The best fishing invariably came on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and Sunday. You always felt the most like having fun on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and Sunday. What was measly little Saturday, eclipsed so by these other days all-glorious without!

If your folks were only like Snoopie’s folks you could play hooky once in a while. Snoopie asserted that his father “didn’t care.” Yours did—very much.

The sole recourse which remained for you was being sick; and insomuch as the real article was annoyingly scarce with you, it was requisite that you manufacture some substitute.

’Tis a spell of beautiful weather—the kind of weather that came, as aforesaid, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays—and Sundays. Your feet lagged to school, and your heart kept pace with them. Now you are idling in your seat, utterly unable to work. A vagrant bee hums in through an open window, and hums out through another. A woodpecker drums, as on a sounding-board, upon the spire of the Congregational church. A blue jay screams derisively, like an exultant truant, among the elms arching the street in front. All these things upset you, stirring as they do the Wanderlust of boyhood.

The sky never has been so blue, the grass and the trees never so green, the sunshine never so golden, nor the air so mellow, as at recess.

You hate school. You don’t want to go in. Snoopie volunteers: