Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/29

 that was all right enough for a change, and was as good a way as any to spend a rainy afternoon. Also, you could occasionally get ideas about fights, out of a play.

But the real occupation of life was the playing of games. He nourished his soul and grew strong on the emotional thrills of games. They were the rich, fertile, substantial soil out of which he shot up into boyhood from childhood. They were his religion, and his business-in-life, the wide field where, unhampered, free as any naked savage, for all his decent knickerbockers and sweater, he raced to and fro, elastic, exultant, wild with the intoxication of the heady young strength poured into him by every new day.

The astounding volume of sound, bursting up like flame and lava from a volcano, which rose from every group of boys at play bore witness to the extravagant and superabundant splendor of the intensity with which they lived, a splendor not at all recognized by suffering householders near whose decent and quiet homes a gang of boys settled down to play and yell and shriek and quarrel and run and yell again.

It was the boys' world, not only untouched by grown-ups but blessedly even unsuspected by parents. Since it was theirs, since they created it anew every day, it exactly fitted their needs, and it grew and changed with their inner growth as their school never did. They were far from any self-conscious notion that they created it. Rather they seemed to themselves to accept it from the outside, as they accepted the weather. What had they to do with the succession of the seasons, either of games or temperature? In the nature of things you could no more play marbles in the autumn than pick wild strawberries in December.

In the autumn, they played football, a sort of association-football with no limit to the number on each side, played with a heavy black rubber ball, blown up with a brass tube. The tube always got lost, and the valve always leaked. After a few games it became deflated, with the resiliency of a soggy sponge. But it was kicked to and fro just the same.

When snow came, there was snow-balling, with forts of a rich, chocolate color, from the street-dirt mixed with the