Roadless parents—a child looking for its road in life! That is Nature's plan to stop imitation, to block the roads of parents to their children, and force these into new paths for the development of the individual and of the race. And in what other country is that spectacle so common as in our American democracy, where progress is so swift and the future so vast and untrod and untried that nearly every generation in thousands of cottages represents a revolt and a revolution of children against their parents, their work and their ways? But Webster's father and mother were not philosophers as to how Nature works out her plan through our American democracy: they merely had their parental apprehensions and confidentially discussed these. What would Webster be, would he ever be anything? He would finish at high school this year and it was time to decide.
A son of the grocer in the block had made an unexpected upward stride in life and surprised all the cottagers. Webster's father and mother took care to bring this meritorious example to their son's attention.
"What are you going to be, Webster?" his mother asked one morning at breakfast, looking understandingly at Webster's father.
"I don't know what I'm going to be," Webster had replied unconcernedly. "I know I'm not going to be what he is!"
"It would never do to try to force him," his father said later. "Not him. Besides, think of a couple of American parents undertaking to force their children to do anything—any children! We'll have to wait a while longer. If he's never to be anything, of course forcing could never make him into something. It would certainly bring on a family disturbance and the family disturbance would be sure to get on my nerves at the bank and I might make mistakes in my figures."
Then in the April of that year, about the time the woods were turning green and he began to look toward them with the old longing now grown stronger, a great thing happened to Webster.
