And yet, looking
back, one has parted with something, a sort of zest and intensity
that one would fain have retained. I felt that I would have given
much to be able to have communicated a few of the hard lessons of
experience that I have learnt by my errors and mistakes, to these
jolly youngsters; but there again comes in the pathos of boyhood,
that one can make no one a present of experience, and that virtue
cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be virtue. They were bound,
all those ingenuous creatures, to make their own blunders, and one
could not save them a single one, for all one's hankering to help.
That is of course the secret, that we are here for the sake of
experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness. Yet one would
keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if
one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces
on which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible
signs.
The cricket drew to an end; the shadows began to lengthen on the
turf. The mimic warriors were disbanded.
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