Naturally not. You and I, Uncle Jones, might be expected to imitate each other's good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety,--though I do not say that we would,--but from the point of view of a boy these virtues are unconventional. Their practice shocks and disconcerts the observer. The behavior of Sir Isaac Newton, when kicked in the stomach, was perfectly scandalous.
And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire to "make" the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole--but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer prevent him. He can fish with a bent pin in the porcelain bathtub,--adding a goldfish to make the pursuit more exciting,--every morning before he takes his bath. He can chase butterflies; here and there, indeed, a man makes a profession of it, and institutions of learning call him an entomologist, and pay him much honor and a small salary. Nobody forbids him to enlarge his mental horizon by reading the lives of criminals and detectives; and I can myself direct him to many an entertaining book, which is at once far worse and far better, morally and artistically, than the sober narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the yard for boys to read by stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would do him a world of good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back home at night. If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed boyhood, to join with him, he can play at marbles, tick, puss-in-the-corner, hop-scotch, ring-taw, and "Hot beans ready buttered." (Uncle Jones mentions these games. I do not remember all of them myself, but "Hot beans ready buttered" sounds especially interesting.) And where better than in some green, quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you _will_ raise the question of conventionality, why more foolish than golf, or folk-dancing?
But what he cannot do is to assume the boy's unconsciousness of his own mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man with a worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows nothing--Creditor Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor Conscience, and Creditor Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even claimed by one philosopher of my acquaintance that this is why men wish they were once more boys. I grant the plausibility of this opinion; for the more a man is is devoted to his wife and family, the more he is beset and worried by these troublesome creditors, the more, one may reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to meet his obligations, and is likely now and then to envy the boy his narrow, conventional, but immortal-feeling life.