the infancy of her womanhood. She has never comprehended what a
glorious thing it is to be a woman--she has not comprehended what
it is to be a woman at all. What can be that woman's ideas of
life, who thinks and declares that the happiest moments of her
experience were those which were filled with the frolic of animal
life? If I felt like this, I should wish that my children had been
born rabbits, or squirrels, or lambs, or kittens, because they,
having enjoyed the pleasures of the animal, will never awake to
the woes of another type of life. The real reason why any man
sings from the heart,

"O, would I were a boy again,"

is, that he is "stuck"--to use a homely but expressive word--
between boyhood and manhood, and, not feeling up to his position,
has a very strong disposition to back out of it. The man who
really wishes he were a boy, is either painfully conscious of the
loss of the purity of his boyhood, or he has the cowardly
disposition to shirk the responsibilities of his life. The
romantic regard which we all entertain for the simple animal
content and joy of childhood, is a very different thing to this.
It was Mr. Neal's loafer that really wished he were a pig; and it
is a loafer always who would retire from man's duties and estate,
into the content either of childhood or kittenhood.

It is very natural that a man should be blinded and pained by
passing from a shaded room into dazzling sunlight. It is a serious
thing to leap from a luxurious, enervating warm bath into cold
water. All sudden transitions are shocking; and God has contrived
the transitions of our lives so that they shall be mainly gradual.