In the summer-time we often climbed to the top of the hills and looked down the valley to see the river winding off on its everlasting course. Then we would fancy that we were mountaineers and explorers, and would pick our way along the hills with the beautiful valley far beneath. I do not know why we climbed the hills in the summer-time. It could not have been for the scenery, which was really very fine; for boys care little for this sort of thing. The love of Nature comes with maturing years and is one of the few compensations for growing old. More and more as the years go by we love the sun and the green earth, the silent mountains and the ever-moving sea. It seems as if slowly and all unawares our Mother Nature prepares and ripens us to be taken back into her all-embracing breast.
But boys like hills and animals and trees, not so much because they are a part of Nature as for the life and activity they bring. So we climbed the hills and the trees, and went far down the winding stream for no purpose except to go, and when we reached the point for which we started out we turned around and came back home. Still, since I have grown to man’s estate I do the self-same thing. I make my plans to go to a foreign port, and with great trouble and expense travel half-way round the earth, and then, not content with the new places I have found, and longing for the old ones once again, I turn back and journey home.
Since the days when we children followed the crests of the hills along the valley, this lovely scene has fallen under the notice of a business man. He has built a hotel on the top of the highest hill, overlooking the valley and the little town, and in the summer-time its wide verandas are filled day after day with women, young and old, who sit and swing in hammocks, and read Richard Harding Davis and Winston Churchill, and watch for the mail and wait for the dinner-bell to ring.
With what never-ending schemes our youth was filled, and in what quick succession each followed on the others’ heels! Our most cherished plans fell far short of what we hoped and dreamed. Somehow everything in the world conspired to defeat our ends,—and most of all, our own childish nature, which jumped from fad to fancy in such quick succession that we could never do more than just begin. Even when we carried our plans almost to completion, their result was always very far short of the thought our minds conceived.