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Show SCHOOL DAYS The school bells began ringing ring-ing last Monday morning, notifying noti-fying the children that vacation's vaca-tion's days are at an end. To the school boy, the event has its sad side; to those who were school boys long ago, but have gone out into life's conflict, the occasion is one of sweet memories, memor-ies, recalling, as it does, the time of youth, when there was so much of wonderment in the world and the future was made roseate in fond dreams. Recently President Poincave of France visited his native town, and, addressing the people, peo-ple, he told them how he loved the place because of all the recollections re-collections of his boyhood which it stirred of children playing under the trees in his mother's garden, of Sunday walks over the hills, of school rooms in which he first found the desire for knowledge. Those things have often been said before, but they will never become platitudes, for to speak of such memories is to quicken them in the minds of others to begin a music of thought in which every one can join, for everyone knows the tune of it. Even those who spent their childhood in a lonely back street think of it as unlike other back streets, for there is something stronger than reason reas-on that transforms its monotony for them, giving to it the inexplicable inex-plicable significance of a dream. There is' nothing to prove that childhood is happier than later years. Indeed, we remember re-member things connected with the sharp griefs of childhood just as eagerly as things connected con-nected with its joys. Both start the same music in our minds, the same vain but delightful de-lightful passion for what can never be again. It is like the blue of distance which enchants a country not more strange and beautiful in itself than the ground we tread, and which makes us desire to reach it even while we know that it can only be seen from afar. |