wanted
then, but I do know now as I look back, and I think there are thousands
of children like me, the kind who are called "queer kids" by their
playmates, who are all groping for much the same thing.

"Where is the Golden Age to-day?" they are asking. "We hear of all this
from our mothers. We hear of brave knights and warriors, of God and
Christ as they walked around on earth like regular people, of saints and
preachers, writers and painters. But where are the great men living now?
Not in our house nor on our street, nor in school nor in our church on
the corner. There is nothing there that thrills us. Why isn't there?
What is the matter? We are no longer babies, we are becoming big boys
and girls. What will we do when we are grown up? Has everything fine
already been done? Is there no chance for us to be great and to do
them?"

It was to questionings like these that my mother had led me up from the
harbor.

CHAPTER V

And to such questionings I believe that for many children of my kind
there is often some familiar place--a schoolroom or a commonplace
street, or a dreary farm in winter, a grimy row of factories or the ugly
mouth of a mine--that mutely answers,

"No. There are no more great men for you, nor any fine things left to be
done. There is nothing else left in the world but me. And you'd better
stop trying to find it."

In my case this message came from the harbor, that one part of the
modern world which looked up at me steadily day after day. Vaguely
struggle as I would to build up fine things in the present from all that
my mother brought out of the past, the harbor would not let me. For what
I clothed it soon stripped naked, what I built it soon tore down.

"When you were little," it seemed to say, "for you I was filled with
thrilling idols--cannibals and condors, Sam, strange wonder-ships and
sailors adventuring to heathen lands. But then I dragged these idols
down and made you see me as I am. And as I showed myself to you, so I'll
show up all other wonderful places or men that your mother would have
you believe in."

It did this, as I remember it, in the easiest most trivial ways, like
some huge beast that flicks off a fly and then lumbers unconcernedly on.

My mother by years of patient work had built up my religion, filling it
with the grand figures of God and Christ and his followers down to the
present time, ending with Henry Ward Beecher. When this man died I felt
awe at her silen