|I AM always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes,
in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little
doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture
limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the
United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him
in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the
home nest.
The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the
tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to
grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led
away out into the great untried realm of space.
While the great world throbs on, he sighs and refuses to throb. While
other young men put on their seal-brown overalls and wrench the laurel
wreath and other vegetables from cruel fate, the youth who dangles near
the old nest, and eats the hard-earned groceries of his father, shivers
on the brink of life's great current and sheds the scalding tear.
He is the young-man-afraid-of-the-sawbuck, the human being with the
unlaundried spinal column. The only vital question that may be said to
agitate his pseudo brain is, whether he shall marry and bring his wife
to the home nest, or marry and tear loose from his parents to live
with his father-in-law. Finally he settles it and compromises by living
alternately with each.
How the old folks yearn to see him. How their aged eyes light up when
he comes with his growing family to devour everything in sight and yawn
through the space between meals. This is the heyday of his life; the
high noon of the boy who never ventured to ride the yearling colt, or to
be yanked through the shimmering sunlight at the tail of a two-year-old.
He never dared to have any fun because he might bump his nose and make
it bleed on his clean clothes. He never surreptitiously cut the copper
wire off the lightning rod to snare suckers with, and he never went in
swimming because the great, rude boys might duck him or paint him with
mud. He shunned the green apple of boyhood, and did not slide down hill
because he would have to pull his sled back to the top again.
Now, he borrows other people's newspapers, eats the provisions of
others, and sits on the counter of the grocery till the proprietor calls
him a counter irritant.
There can be nothing more un-American than this flabby polyp, this
one-horse tadpole that never becomes a frog. The average American would
rather burst up in business six times in four years, and settle for nine
cents on the dollar, than to lead such a life. He would rather be an
active bankrupt than a weak and bilious barnacle on the clam-shell of
home.
The true American would rather work himself into luxury or the lunatic
asylum than to hang like a great wart upon the face of nature. This
young man is not in accordance with the Yankee schedule, and yet I do
not want to say that he belongs to any other nation. Foreign powers may
have been wrong; trans-Atlantic nations may have erred, and the system
of European government may have been erroneous, but I would not come out
and charge them with this horrible responsibility. They never harmed me,
and I will not tarnish their fair fame with this grave indictment.
He will breathe a certain amount of atmosphere, and absorb a given
amount of feed for a few years, and then the full-grown biped will leave
the home nest at last. The undertaker will come and get him and take
what there is left of him out to the cemetery. That will be all. There
can be no deep abiding sorrow for him here; public buildings will not be
draped in mourning, and you can get your mail at the usual hour when he
dies. The band will not play a sadder strain because the fag-end of
a human failure has tapered down to death, and the soft and shapeless
features are still. You will have no trouble getting a draft cashed on
that day, and the giddy throng will join the picnic as they had made
arrangements to do.