Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/73

 the question of cause and effect, resolved as young philosophers to profit by their experience, and seek similar pleasures thereafter where telegraph wires ensnared not; while some, perhaps, profited not at all, but only made new kites and abandoned them to the roguish wind, which again traitorously delivered them up to the insatiable enemies of kites and birds.

Is it not said that the child is the father of the man?

And as we sat there in the silence with the stars burning in the purple deeps of the summer night above us, we dreamed of the kites which children of a larger growth fly in the face of heaven—toys of love and faith—toys of ambition and of folly—toys of grotesque resolve and flattering ideals—toys of vain dreams and vain expectation—the kites of human Hope, gaudy-colored or gray, richly tinseled or humbly simple—rising and soaring and tossing on the fickle winds of the world, only to become entangled at last in that mighty web of indissoluble and everlasting threads which the Weird Sisters spin for all of us.