Boy is city-born and city-bred, and a day in the country is better than a thousand in street and park.  A day in the woods, when chestnuts and walnuts hustle down with every breath of air, and the hollows are knee-deep with painted leaves, has joys the eager tongue trips over itself in the endeavor to recount.  Boy and Boy’s mother took the six o’clock train to town last night.  This morning, throwing open the parlor blinds, I espy the six flat, white beans and the three red-speckled crab-apples.  They were so much to the owner; except for the value imparted by association with the dancing blue eyes and the tight clutch of fingers that had green stains on them when the wrestle with the pods was over, they are so much more than worthless to everybody else—­that there is infinite pathos in the litter.  It is picturesque and poetic.

There will be no poetry, picturesqueness or pathos in the litter when Boy is older by a year or two.  His leavings in outlandish places will become “trash,” and still later on “rubbish” and “hateful.”  At twelve years of age he will be a “hulking boy,” and convicted of bringing more dirt into the house upon one pair of soles than three pairs of hands can clean up.  Eyes that fill now in surveying the tokens of his recent occupations and his lordly disregard of conventionalities, will flash petulantly upon books left, face downward, over night, on the piazza floor; muddy shoes kicked into the corner of the hall; the half-whittled cane and open knife on the sofa, and coats and caps everywhere except upon the hooks intended for them.

I once heard a grown-up beauty declare in the presence and hearing of a half-grown brother, that, “every boy should be put under a barrel at fourteen, and kept there until he was twenty, out of the sight of his kindred and acquaintances.”

“Up to twenty-one he is an unmitigable nuisance!” concluded the belle, with the vanity of one who has put the case smartly.

The lad listened to the tirade without the twitch of a muscle—­stolidity that proved him to be well used to such flaying.  Three out of four boys in that family “turned out badly,” and were cried down by a scandalized community for disgracing a decent and godly ancestry.  Hearing this, I recollected the beauty and the barrel, and speculated sadly whether or not this were the key to the enigma.

It generally happens that the grown-up sister has less patience with the growing brother than any other member of the household.  From principle and from inclination, and, I am inclined to add, from nature, she “sits upon” Boy habitually.

Ungrateful Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called her quondam lover, Alexander Pope—­

   “A sign-post likeness of the human race: 
    That is, at once resemblance and disgrace.”

In her visions of the coming man, the sister resents the truth that Boy belongs to the same species and sex, or persists in judging him by this standard.  In the “freshness” of his age and kind, he is skeptical as to her good looks and other fascinations, and takes wicked satisfaction in giving her to understand that he, at least, “is not fooled by her tricks and manners.”  If her “nagging” is a thorn under his jacket, his cool disdain is a grain of sand inside of her slipper.