The Newark journal., 1909-04-23
HANDICAP
Copyright. by Joseph B. Bowles.)


 born. of the age in which he lives. of the nation to which he belongs and of the community in which he is reared So he usually assumes a considerable responsibility in undertaking to be a boy at all. If he survives the initial onset he may go down in the battle for teeth. If he is victor in that fray, he finds long line of watchers on his path-mumps and measles and ehickenpox and whooping cough and sore eyes and sore toes and \ yeet- hearts; and he takes them all with un- selfish impartiality. If he survives, he may be killed by a gentleman with a military. title from the Blue Grass state some fine day.
 His cheerful acceptance of these unchosen limitations would be re- garded as an irrefragible proof of genius If he were not boy. He keeps hopeful He gives himself a good time If there is any juvenile business going on, he gets on the ground floor, takes promoters share in the concern and Is present when dividends are de- clared several times a day If there Is cloud on his horizon he slips around and finds the silver lining. in sixteen times to one where he misses 1t, like a boy who said to his teacher: We've got smallpox at our house" Small pox! Why. boy, you'll take it" she shrieked. No, won't" he replied, with great and gleeful satisfaction fits my stepmother that's got 1t, and she never gives me anything," He had found the silver lining to that do mestic cloud.
 If sudden emergencies startle him, he gets unstartled instanter. like a boy whose mother told him not to go in swimming, but that evening he came home with the marks of trans gression on his person. You've been in swimming" was her greeting. No. I've not; no indeed!" But what makes your hair so wet, my boy" on, laas=-z., oocu sweatin'." But, my son, your shirt is turned wrosg side out" 70, l got that done gittin' over the fence" This story is told. not with approval of that kind of habit. but solely with ap- preciation of his dazzling, but dan gerous, talent.
 Burdette says never strike a mus tache when 1t Is down" and 1t may be said beware of the boy when he Is down He Is dangerous even when he seems down and out These lines are life:
 Little Willie in the best of sashes. Fell in the fire and burned to ashes By and by. the room grew chilly.
 But nobody cared to poke up Bilie.''
 He may seem dust and ashes. but he is like the soil away out on the Pa cific coast, volcanic ash"
 He has mercurial inheritance, which gives an agitating uncertainty to all of his enterprises. His talk is some what like trap shooting, and, like pigeons, his words are as apt to fly in one direction as in another. He is himself as uncertain as his words. No one knows just how he is going to turn out. He is much like Robert Burns letter to his young friend. which he began by saying:
 Tt may turn ouf song,
 It may turn out n sermon"
 He is like closely folded bud that gives no exact pror- sse of the odors and tones of it's ful'elown maturity He is like some of our little words that may easily cCntradf themselves. Pat" said Mike, 'is your father living yet?" No" replied Pat, mot yet"
 You can tell how young animals will turn out. A young fox will go on dig ging dens and stealing chickens and sucking eggs, just as every fox has done since there first began to be foxes A young bee will go on build ing cells and making honey and sting ing you just as every bee has been doing since the first bee was matched out. It is no trick at all to give scientific prognosis on the young mule With that peculiar blending of the humorous and the melancholy which we have always noticed in the mule, he is foredoomed to lead pie turesque and striking career-striking as long as his hind legs hold out. But the boy-why, he is related to the dust beneath his feet, to the stars all afiame In the sky, to human life in all of it's phases of good and evil, in all of it's history, past, present and to come; to the God above who made him. Just how he turns out will depend on how he gets himself adjusted to that multi form environment of his. He will have to do it himself. But marvellous and multitudinous agencies are at work in his aid.