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.
Here was a man upon whom the eyes of the world had rested, whose name was
familiar to millions, sitting at a table mending broken toys. I was won
back to him before I had looked upon the picture two minutes. I could
overlook all his faults, because his faults were human, just the same as
his love for children was human. The simplicity of the picture showed the
man and the father and the companion, mutely telling the story of his
great love for the boy whom he never hoped to see when grown to manhood.
He fully realized that when the boy became a full-grown man he would not
be there to see him and help him and guide him with his great love.