Page:Field Poems of Childhood.djvu/101

 Oh, how the legs and arms and dust and trouser buttons flew— What florid vocalisms marked that vesper interview! Yes, after all this lapse of years, I feelingly assert, With all respect to mother, it was father's whippings hurt!

The little boy experiencing that tingling 'neath his vest Is often loath to realize that all is for the best; Yet, when the boy gets older, he pictures with delight The bufferings of childhood—as we do here to-night. The years, the gracious years, have smoothed and beautified the ways That to our little feet seemed all too rugged in the days Before you went to selling clothes and I to peddling rimes— So, Harvey, let us sit a while and think upon those times.