On a shining, full-starred night he stood before the little house in the
Penniman side yard and bade farewell to this youth. A long time he gazed
into the arched splendour above. He had never noticed that the stars
were so many and so bright; and they were always there, by day as well
as by night, so his father said. Many of them, on the same veracious
authority, were peopled; some with people who were yet but monkeys like
the Vielhaber's Emil; some with people now come to be human like
himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless
periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could
surmise.

The aging boy felt suddenly friendly with all those distant worlds, glad
they were there, so almost sociably near. On more than one of them,
perhaps far off in that white streak they called the Milky Way, there
must be boys like himself, learning useful things about life, to read
good books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth.
Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like
himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a
man. For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation--of worlds
to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were
outworn--was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the
ways. His last day had been lived as a boy with publicly bare feet.

No more would he feel the soft run of new grass beneath his soles, or
longer need beware the chance nail or sharp stone in the way. On the
morrow, presumably to be a day inviting to bare feet as had all the
other days of his summers, remembered and forgotten, he would, when he
rose, put on stockings and stout shoes; and he would put them on world
without end through all the new mornings of his life, howsoever urgently
with their clement airs they might solicit the older mode. It was a
solemn thing to reflect upon, under a glittering heaven that held, or
not, those who might feel with him the bigness of the moment. He
suffered a vision of the new shoes, stiffly formidable, side by side at
the foot of his bed in the little house. It left him feeling all his
years.

And he would wear long trousers! With tolerant amusement he saw himself
as of old, barefoot, bare-legged, the knee pants buttoned to the calico
blouse. It was all over. He scanned the stars a last time, dimly feeling
that the least curious of their inhabitants would be aw