A new boy's author has appeared in the world of letters, and it is almost as glad an event as when "Mark Twain" first showed the boy-side of himself in "Tom Sawyer" years ago. I speak of William Allen White, the man who wrote "The King of Boyville" and the "Martyrdom of Mealy Jones" for "McClure's Magazine." Mr. White seems not to have forgotten how it feels to be a boy. I know of no one who writes of a boy's heart as understandingly. His stories are simple tales of boy-life in a Kansas town, but they will be dear to all boys because, as Kipling says, "In the hearts of the children there is neither east nor west." I read "The Martyrdom of Mealy Jones" aloud to a western boy and a boy from New Hampshire and the effect was the same on both. It seems that the world over when one boy holds up two fingers to another boy, it means, "Will you go swimming?" And when the other boys take a little fellow's clothes while he is in the creek and tie them up in knots and throw the garments into the water so that the knots swell and the urchin has to untie them with his teeth, the latter process is everywhere called "Chawing raw beef." Mountain boys and prairie boys alike have all known what it was to notice for the first time that one girl was nicer than other girls, and they have all sent her theirs mother's roses and when she thanked them they have all gone down to their turning poles in the barn and "chined themselves and chined themselves" for joy, just as "Piggy Dennington" did. And at moments when their passion grew particularly reckless as they were walking home from school with Her they have all walked on their hands before their Heart's Desire and shouted, "I'll bet you can't do that!" which is a boy's manner of declaring his love.
Mr. White seems to have remembered the things that grown up boys usually forget. As you read him you constantly come up with words and phrases that bring your own childhood back fresh and fragrant to you. You grow younger every page you turn. He knows thoroughly that mystic speech of childhood which dates further back than any history of language, that vocabulary which is wonderfully alike in all ages and among all nations, a sort of primitive mode of expression that through all the modifications of civilization has remained intact, like the old sacred tongues in which the priests of the orient speak of God.
Ruydard Kipling's latest novel, "Captains Courageous," is a book that every American boy and every American father should read. It is an acknowledged fact abroad that American boys are the least mannerly, the most impertinent, the most wilful and wayward boys in the world. This of course applies chiefly to sons of men of means, which are the only boys Europeans know anything about. In Europe, even a rich man's son at some time of his life must learn the meaning of the word discipline. In Germany and France he must serve in the army, in the same barracks and under the same regulations as the sons of hostlers and wood-cutters. In England he must go to schools where he will have to fight his way among other boys and where no amout of money can help him. But in America rich men's sons are the curse of our colleges and almost of our society. From the time they can talk they are imbued with the notion that money and money only is power, and that to spend it is the only dignified occupation of life.
Mr. Kipling has seen all this with the keen eyes of a thoughtful foreigner, and he has taken just such a boy for the hero of his novel. Harvey Cheyne is the son of a California railroad king who has been pampered from his infancy by a foolish mother who never made him do anything he didn't want to or forbid him to do anything he did want to. He has been educated by private tutors who have taught him nothing. He is a yellow, sickly boy with no accomplishments beyond wearing striped sweaters, smoking cigarettes and bullying people. At the time the novel opens he is on board a line steamer going to Europe with his mother. The following extract will illustrate what the other passengers thought of him:
"That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too fresh."
A white-haired German reached for a sandwich and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff."
"Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions, under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to Europe to finish his education."
Very fortunately for him, this disagreeable youngster fell overboard off the coast of Newfoundland and was picked up by a Gloucester fishing smack. The fisherman disbelieved all his stories of his father's millions and put him to work catching cod "for his keep." There all the good that nature had put in the boy came out. The fresh wind and the salt water and that simple, hardy life made a man of him.
When "Harvey" sailed hack to Massachusetts with the fishing craft next year, he telegraphed his parents in California who thought him drowned. The flying trip of the millionaire and his wife across the continent in their private car is one of the finest things Kipling ever wrote. O the life, the color of it! The pages seem to throb with the terrific speed of the engine and you can hear those swift wheels kiss the rails. When "Harvey Cheyne, Senior" finds this well-set-up, sturdy fisher lad in place of the puny, quarrelsome boy who had left him a year ago, he realizes how nearly fatal was his mistake in bringing up his boy, and mutters to himself, "We never know when we are taking our biggest chances."
"Harvey's" mother wept over him in the old way, but the Gloucester fishermen have done too much for him—he is not to be spoiled again. Ordinarily, if a bo hasy any chance at all, he comes out all right. There are several thousand boys in America who ought to fall overboard into a fishing smack or be kidnapped and put to work. If George M. Pullman's sons had had "Harvey Cheyne's" chance they might have been other than a public shame to their father. But with them it was the old, old story which is the ruin of American youth; too much money and a foolish mother.
