The
young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed
wings; and wings were for use--to soar with. Ambition, the desire to
mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read, studied, and
observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant
fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an instinct
analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took to the
discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was
directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public
wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a
discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in
society. He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is
at his tricks. He was also at a stage of development, when boys are
least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own
importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the
Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence are
by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and
palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth
had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the
matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and
that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.
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