Brought
together at school in early life, when the mind and soul are receiving
the impressions which endure through life, they naturally form
intimacies, and almost always special partialities and preferences.
Each has his or her favorite, these partialities are usually
reciprocal, and their consequence is a desire on the part of each to
see the other excel. To accomplish this, children, as well as grown
people, will make a greater effort than they will simply to succeed or
to gratify a personal ambition to that effect. Thus they sympathize
with and stimulate each other. Every Georgia boy of fifty years ago,
with gray-head and tottering step now, remembers his sweetheart, for
whom he carried his hat full of peaches to school, and for whom he made
the grape-vine swing, and how at noon he swung her there.
'T is bonny May; and I to-day
Am wrinkled seventy-four,
Still I enjoy, as when a boy,
Much that has gone before.
Is it the leaves and trees, or sheaves
Of yellow, ripened grain,
Which wake to me, in memory,
My boyhood's days again?
These seem to say 't is bonny May,
As when they sweetly grew,
And gave their yield, in wood and field,
To me, when life was new.
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