Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and
corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this
splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of
pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as
it was wicked. The preacher said the world was wicked and vain. It did
not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew.
Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor
of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know that
when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according
to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.

In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of
trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite
opportunities. His name--Philip Burnett--with which the world, at least
the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to
write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks,
did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been
confronted with it as something apart from himself. But the Philip that
he was he felt sure would do something in the world. What that something
should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the
history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult
to write a poem like "Thanatopsis" if he took time enough, building up a
line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could
use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing
imagination. Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have
more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more
consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he
was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between
battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church,
and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down
the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the
district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see
Phil, who had gone into the army. Perhaps the preacher would have a
sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would
take this attack on him. Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a
reasonable ambition? Perhaps his town would be proud of him