What if I were to see the world like the Child?
Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles. They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them, and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys—looked as if it had been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back, when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on and thought how they felt about it.
Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and looked back; saw those three boys—a little retinue to that solitary fish—trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and wanted to be in it! Then I saw them going round the bend in the road thirty years away.
I still want to be one of those boys.
And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I will yet grow up to them!
I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish—the way they folded it around with something, the way they made the most of it, is the way to feel about the world.
I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as regards technical and comparatively unimportant details or as regards perspective on the fish the boys may not have been right. It is possible that they had not taken a point of view, measured in inches or volts or foot-pounds, that was right and could last forever; but I know that the spirit of their point of view was right—the spirit that hovered around the three boys and around the fish that day was right and could last forever.
It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit in which new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by Boys and Girls and—God, are being made.
It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about worlds. And it is only boys and girls who are right.
I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the rain singing, "I believe! I believe!"