Page:Dream days.djvu/248

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

DREAM DAYS

when their anxieties and responsibilities are considered, have hardly more to offer. And so it will continue to be a problem, to the youth in whom ambition struggles with a certain sensuous appreciation of life's side-dishes, whether the career he is called upon to select out of the glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better be that of an heir or an engine-driver.

In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving itself In childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to work on the principle of the "Borough-English" of our happier ancestors, and in most cases of inheritance it is the youngest that succeeds. Where the "res" is "angusta," and the weekly books are simply a series of stiff hurdles at each of which in succession the paternal legs falter with growing suspicion of their powers to clear the flight, it is in the affair of clothes that the right of succession tells, and "the hard heir strides about the land "in trousers long ago framed for fraternal limbs—frondes novas et non sua poma. A bitter thing indeed! Of those pretty silken threads that knit humanity together, high and

208