Every Sunday the preacher denounced the glitter and frivolity and corruption of what he called Society, until the boy longed to see this splendid panorama of cities and hasting populations, the seekers of pleasure and money and fame, this gay world which was as fascinating as it was wicked.  The preacher said the world was wicked and vain.  It did not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew.  Of course the boy had no experience.  He had never heard of Juvenal nor of Max Nordau.  He had no philosophy of life.  He did not even know that when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.

In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite opportunities.  His name—­Philip Burnett—­with which the world, at least the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks, did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been confronted with it as something apart from himself.  But the Philip that he was he felt sure would do something in the world.  What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading.  It would not be difficult to write a poem like “Thanatopsis” if he took time enough, building up a line a day.  And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform.  This was a pleasing imagination.  Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army.  Perhaps the preacher would have a sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would take this attack on him.  Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a reasonable ambition?  Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual oration at the Agricultural Fair.  He could see the audience of familiar faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the nobility of the farmer’s life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used to before he was famous.  What he would say, he was not thinking of, but the position he would occupy before the audience.  There were no misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.