“I’m right glad,” the doctor said one evening, “to see that you don’t lose heart, Squire.”
“Bless me, sir, why should I? To be sure we’re poor now, but God has left us a deal of comfort, doctor, and, after all, it doesn’t take much to make a man happy.”
Boys will be boys. Yes, we all know that. But there comes a time in the life of every right-thinking lad when another truth strikes home to him, that boys will be men.
I rather think that the sooner a boy becomes cognisant of this fact the better. Life is not all a dream; it must sooner or later become a stern reality. Life is not all pleasant parade and show, like a field-day at Aldershot; no, for sooner or later pomp and panoply have to be exchanged for camp-life and action, and bright uniforms are either rolled in blood and dust, or come triumphant, though tarnished, from the field of glory. Life is not all plain sailing over sunlit seas, for by-and-by the clouds bank up, storms come on, and the good ship has to do battle with wind and wave.
But who would have it otherwise? No one would who possesses the slightest ray of honest ambition, or a single spark of that pride of self which we need not blush to own.
One day, about the beginning of autumn, Rupert and Archie, and their sister Elsie, were in the room in the tower. They sat together in a turret chamber, Elsie gazing dreamily from the window at the beautiful scenery spread out beneath. The woods and wilds, the rolling hills, the silvery stream, the half-ripe grain moving in the wind, as waves at sea move, and the silvery sunshine over all. She was in a kind of a daydream, her fingers listlessly touching a chord on the harp now and then. A pretty picture she looked, too, with her bonnie brown hair, and her bonnie blue eyes, and thorough English face, thorough English beauty. Perhaps Archie had been thinking something of this sort as he sat there looking at her, while Rupert half-lay in the rocking-chair, which his brother had made for him, engrossed as usual in a book.
Whether Archie did think thus or not, certain it is that presently he drew his chair close to his sister’s, and laying one arm fondly on her shoulder.
“What is sissie looking at?” he asked.
“Oh, Archie,” she replied, “I don’t think I’ve been looking at anything; but I’ve been seeing everything and wishing!”