son's accusing words like large print before his eyes.

For once in his life Benjamin Morris had heard the plain truth from the
lips of his favorite son. Yet he did not realize the seriousness of
his son's charge. He had heard the words, but their real meaning did
not seem to pierce his brain, so filled with knowledge that there was
no room there for any interest in the living, or any thought that the
present, the passing moment in which we make our little life history,
is more precious to each of us then the great moments of the past, no
matter how filled they may be with heroic figures.

Benjamin Morris had been long years ago an infant Prodigy. Perhaps you
fellows who read this have never known one; and if so, you are lucky.
An infant Prodigy shows an unnatural amount of intelligence at a very
early age. So far it is all right; and if he belongs to a sensible
family, he is urged into athletics, and sleeps out of door and manages
to grow up so he will pass in a crowd. But sometimes there are proud
parents who read too many books on how to train a child, and pay too
little attention to the child himself; and there are aunts, perhaps, as
well; and they all take the poor little genius and proceed to train him
all out of shape. He rattles off all sorts of pieces, Horatio at the
Bridge, and Casabianca, and Anthony's Oration Over Caesar, are easy as
pancakes and syrup to him. Then he skips whole grades in school and
plows through college like a mole under a rose bush, enjoying himself
immensely, no doubt, down there in the dark, but missing all the
benefit of the light and air and sunshine. So the infant Prodigy gets
to be a grown Prodigy, and presently an old Prodigy, never once
suspecting that knowledge, hurtfully taken and wrongfully used, can be
almost as great a sin as ignorance.