A Melody in Silver | Page 6

into the glory of birthday happiness, he wanted to be very certain that this famous period of his life had actually come.
Before demanding if it were quite true, he lay still awhile and thought about it. He looked at Mother's face, and snuggled his fingers into the fairy foam of her nightgown, but the face and the fairy foam at her throat had not changed in the least. They were just the same as they had been yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
It was very strange. He had supposed that when a little boy is four years old, his life would be somehow--different. That is why he was still in doubt; he was not at all sure about being four years old. He would wake up Mother and then, if he was It, she would make him feel that he was.
Her reassurance, though, was not nearly so satisfying as he had hoped.
"Yes, dear; it's your birthday. Now go to sleep awhile, my pretty."
David lay very still, but he did not go to sleep. By and by he asked rather uneasily:
"What do you do first?"
"What do you mean, little boy?"
"Little? Am I little?"
"Of course you're growing," Mother told him.
But David would not be deceived. Already the suspicion had come to him that there was nothing grand about being four years old. It was not a success; it was a failure, and his one hope now rested in Dr. Redfield, for this was the morning when the Doctor had promised to waylay the little boy.
"How does that begin?" David asked. He could not think what it was that began.
"How does what begin?" Mother inquired.
And that was not nice nor reasonable of her. Mothers are made to answer questions, not to ask questions, and they are so discouraging when they can't understand about being waylaid! David felt abused, but he decided to have one more try at her. Then, if she didn't give him satisfaction, he would know that Four Years Old was all a humbug. As he looked longingly into her face, his words faltered, as though he were again expecting disappointment.
"Will he--will he wear his big, shiny hat when he does it?"
Into Mother's face came a puzzled, half knowing look. She recalled the admiration inspired in a certain little boy by a certain abominable top hat that a certain doctor had once worn to a certain annual meeting of the State Medical Society. But this was the extent of her knowledge.
"When he does what?" she asked.
The little boy's lip trembled, and he turned away his face. He saw it wasn't any use. Mother didn't understand; she evidently hadn't tried. It was plain that he was not four years old; he was only three. It is very hard on little boys to be only that old when they have made up their minds to be four. So, when David was being dressed, he suffered all the while with a severe case of what is commonly called pouts, but which in reality is something much sadder.
"My, my!" said Mother, as she drew a stocking over the pink toes of his right foot, "one mustn't look like that on his birthday."
"It is not my birthday," he said, not impertinently, but politely and woefully.
Even a pair of new shoes did not prove that this was his birthday, and yet they helped to prove it. One gets them at such times as Christmas and birthdays, and such a delightful squeak was in these shoes that David could scarcely eat his breakfast for wanting to walk about in them. If a circus should come to town, he would now be ready for it; he had the shoes. And besides, there were tassels on them--wonderful tassels. It is much easier to be a brave soldier-man if they have tassels.
Do you know what it is to be a brave soldier-man? Well, to be that, one must be kind and sweet and unselfish and do right. And doing right is doing mostly what you don't want to do. To wash a lot--that is right; to keep your fingers out of the pie--that is right; to keep your hands from spilling mucilage on the cat's back--that is right. If you make dents with a tack-hammer in Mother's piano, that is not right; that is a surprise.
The only safe way of doing right is to think of what you would rather do, and then do something else. But often this is such hard work that sometimes one doesn't care much about being a brave soldier-man.
For all that, it's jolly fine to have soldier shoes. They came to David in time to save his faith in the business of being four years old. It now began to have a glad feel about it, and he walked perkily to the