" A perfectly foolish
answer, that last. They had money to fritter away at the grocery,
and the butcher-shop, and the dry-goods store, but when it came to
a necessity of life, such as going to the circus, they let on they
couldn't afford it. A likely story.
"Only jist this little bit of a once. Aw, now, please. Please,
cain't I go? Aw now, I think you might. Aw now, woncha? Aw,
paw. I ain't been to a reely show for ever so long. Aw, the
Scripture pammerammer, that don't count. Aw, paw. Please
cain't I go? Aw, please!" And so forth and so on, with much more
of the same sort. No, I can't go into details. it's too terrible.
Even those of us whose daddies said plainly and positively: "Now,
I can't let you go. No, Willie. That's the end of it. You can't
go." Even those, I say, hoped against hope. It simply could not
be that what the human heart so ardently longed for should be
denied by a loving father. This same conviction applies to other
things, even when we are grown up. It is against nature and the
constituted scheme of things that we cannot have what we want so
badly. (And, in general, it may be said that we can have almost
anything we want, if we only want it hard enough. That's the
trouble with us. We don't want it hard enough.) We boys lay there
in the shade and pulled the long stalks of grass and nibbled off the
sweet, yellow ends, as we dramatized miracles that could happen just
as well as not, if they only would, consarn 'em! For instance, you
might be going along the street, not thinking of anything but how
much you wanted to go to the circus, and how sorry you were because
you hadn't the money, and your daddy wouldn't give you any; and
first thing you 'd know, you 'd stub your toe on something, and
you'd look down and there'd be a half a dollar that somebody had
lost - Gee! If it would only be that way! But we knew it wouldn't,
because only the other Sunday, Brother Longenecker had said: "The
age of miracles is past.
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