Just across the river lives the old toy maker, an old bachelor who has been living the life of a hermit for many years. He is now almost seventy years old, but works at his bench as vigorously as he did when I first knew him. He will not discuss his past life, but avoids it as though old memories give him pain. But his relatives say he was once disappointed in love—jilted on what was to be his wedding day. Some pretend to know of a wedding suit still preserved and packed away in a trunk, but never to be worn by a bridegroom while the old toy maker lives and has the clothes in his possession.
He avoids women, and doesn’t want to be bothered with children, yet he devotes his life to making wagons and sleds for boys. Somewhere down in his unsatisfied heart there is a love for the children still, though it was denied him to have children to bear his name.
There is something tender and affectionate about the picture of a toy maker, and how could this be so, unless the toy maker himself is tender and affectionate? It is safe to say that this particular toy maker can weave more heartaches into the toy he is making for some happy, careless boy, than he could pound into a large farm wagon for men. There is a peculiar sentiment in working for the children, which people feel, even though their education is so barren that they do not know what the word “sentiment” means. The old toy maker may think he hates boys, but his work contradicts him. He does not manufacture his wagons for profit, for the price is so low that he scarcely earns fifty cents a day at the work.
The truth is, the old toy maker loves children in spite of his studied seclusion. He avoids them because they are so closely in touch with women, and to a woman he owes his cheerless life. How foolish to turn against the whole world because one woman proved false. There are true women all around us, and a man should be strong enough to pull the false woman out of his heart and forget her in the society of the good and true. The strong man is made wiser and better through disappointment and the deception of a false woman, and it teaches him how to value a true woman when he finds her waiting to be loved.
The man who gives up at one defeat is to be pitied. His acknowledgment of defeat shows that he is a man of tender nature, preferring to go out of the crowd and live alone, to renewing the contest and do battle with the false and cruel. Every time I see the old toy maker bending over his work, which he does so carefully and perfect, I realize that a loving, trusting heart throbs under his soiled coat. Somehow I can’t help but love the toy makers, because they unconsciously love children. They can’t help it. They may scold and frown and threaten punishment for any trifling offense, but deep down in their soul they do, and can not help but love children.
During the last fifteen years of President Cleveland’s life I was not his friend. I believed that he had gone back on the common people and given his support to plutocracy. I said many bitter things about him, and called him a Judas and a betrayer of his friends. But soon after his death I saw a picture of the ex-President sitting at a table mending toys for his little son.
When I looked upon that picture I could not believe the man was false to his friends. I had only misunderstood him and his motives while serving his country. A false leader of men, or a tyrant, would not stoop to become a toy mender.
He would have no time for sentiment and tender paternal feelings.