[III]
THE FOREST
t was the first day of vacation.
Schools, if you were not through with them, had now become empty, closed, silent buildings, stripped of authority to imprison and bedevil you and then mark you discreditably because you righteously rebelled against being imprisoned and bedeviled. They could safely be left to dust and cobwebs within and to any weeds that might lodge and sprout outside—the more the better. You stood on the spring edge of the long, free, careless summer and could look unconcernedly across at the distant autumn edge. Then as the woods, now in their first full green, were beginning to turn dry and yellow, the powerless buildings would again become tyrannical schools.
But if you had finished high school, on this first day of vacation you were on the Boy's Common: schools behind you, the world of business around you, ahead of you ambitious college or the stately University. Webster had been turned loose on the Boy's Common.