The younger ones gather round him while he narrates the adventures of himself, and Smith minor, and Walker (of Briggs’s house), in a truly epic spirit.  He has made unheard-of expeditions up the river, has chaffed a farmer almost into apoplexy, has come in fifth in the house paper-chase, has put the French master to open shame, and has got his twenty-two colours.  These are the things that make a boy respected by his younger brothers, and admired by his still younger sisters.  They of course have a good deal to tell him.  The setter puppies must be inspected.  A match is being got up with the village eleven, who are boastful and confident in the possession of a bowling curate.  To this the family hero rejoins that “he will crump the parson,” a threat not so awful as it sounds.  There is a wasps’ nest which has been carefully preserved for this eventful hour, and which is to be besieged with boiling water, gunpowder, and other engines of warfare.  Thus the schoolboy’s first days at home are a glorious hour of crowded sport.

It cannot be denied that, as the holidays go on, a biggish boy sometimes finds time hang heavy on his hands, while his father and mother find him hang heavy on theirs.  The first excitement rubs off.  The fun of getting up handicap races among children under twelve years of age wears away.  One cannot always be taking wasps’ nests.  Of course there are many happy boys who live in the country, and pursue the pleasures of manhood with the zest of extreme youth.  Before they are fourteen, they have a rod on a salmon river, a gun on a moor, horses and yachts, and boats at their will, with keepers and gillies to do their bidding.  Others, not so much indulged by fortune and fond parents, live at least among hills and streams, or by the sea.  They are never “in the way,” for they are always in the open air.  Their summer holidays may be things to look back upon all through life.  Natural history, and the beauty of solitary nature; the joys of the swimmer in deep river pools shut in with cool grey walls of rock, and fringed with fern; the loveliness of the high table lands, and the intense hush that follows sunset by the trout stream—­these things are theirs, and become a part of their consciousness.  In later and wearier years these spectacles will flash before their eyes unbidden, they will see the water dimpled by rising trout, and watch the cattle stealing through the ford, and disappearing, grey shapes, in the grey of the hills.

In boyhood, the legends that cling to ancient castles where only a shell of stone is standing, and to the ash-trees that grow by the feudal gateway, and supplied the wood for spear shafts—­these and all the stories of red men that haunt the moors, and of kelpies that make their dwelling in the waters, become very real to us when standing in the dusk by a moorland loch.  If some otter or great fish breaks the water and the stillness with a sudden splash, a boy feels a romantic thrill, a pause of expectation, that later he will never experience.  “The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts,” says the poet; he thinks them out by himself on the downs, or the hills, and tells them to nobody.