When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

Now witness each back yard a training-school for tumblers, trapeze-experts, weight-slingers, jugglers, bareback-riders, and tight-rope walkers. Right among the foremost were you.

“Hen and me are goin’ to have a circus,” you vouchsafed importantly at the family board.

“Hen and who?” queried father, quizzically.

“Hen and me.” Why fuss with grammar, when greater things were impending? It is not what one says, but what one does, that counts: at least, according to your copy-book at school, in which you had laboriously written, “Deeds, not Words,” twenty times.

“We’re goin’ to give it in Hen’s barn, and you and mama’ve got to come.”

“I don’t know that I can get away, having just been to one,” stated father, gravely. “I didn’t expect another so soon.”

“I’ll come,” comforted mother. “When is it?”

“We dunno yet; but everybody that gets in has got to bring ten pins—and bent ones don’t count, either. Hen’s mother’s comin’.”

“Do you think we can spare ten pins?” inquired mother of father.

The idea seemed preposterous to you, with a whole cushion bristling on the bedroom bureau; but nevertheless you awaited, with considerable anxiety, father’s reply.