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Generally speaking a boy’s hands give him no serious concern during the first few years of his life except at such times as his mother grows officious and fussy and insists that they ought to be washed up as far as the regular place for washing a boy’s hands, to wit, about midway between the knuckles and the wrist. The fact that one finger is usually in a state of mashedness is no drawback, but a benefit. The presence of a soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy’s hand a touch of distinctiveness–singles it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Its presence has been known to excuse its happy possessor from such chores as bringing in wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock weeds out of the grass in a front yard where it would be much easier and quicker to pull the grass out of the dock weeds. It may even be made a source of profit by removing the wrappings and charging two china marbles a look. I seem to recall that in the case of a specially attractive injury, such as a thumb nail knocked off or a deep cut which has refused to heal by first intention or an imbedded splinter in process of being drawn out by a scrap of fat meat, that as much as four china marbles could be charged.

On the Fourth of July you occasionally burned your hands and in cold winters they chapped extensively across the knuckles but these were but the marks and scars of honorable endeavor and a hardy endurance. In our set the boy whose knuckles had the deepest cracks in them was a prominent and admired figure, crowned, as you might say, with an imaginary chaplet by reason of his chaps.

With girls, of course, it was different.

Girls were superfluous and unnecessary creatures with a false and inflated idea of the value of soap and water. Their hands weren’t good for much anyway. Later on we discovered that a girl’s hands were excellent for holding purposes in a hammock or while coming back from a straw ride, but I am speaking now of the earlier stages of our development, before the presence of the ostensibly weaker sex began to awaken responsive throbs in our several bosoms–in short when girls were merely nuisances and things to be ignored whenever possible. In that early stage of his existence hands have no altruistic or sentimental or ornamental value for a boy–they are for useful purposes altogether and are regarded as such.

It is only when he has reached the age of tail coats and spike-fence collars that he discovers two hands are frequently too many and often not enough. They are too many at your first church wedding when wearing your first pair of white kids and they are not enough at a five o’clock tea. There is a type of male who can go to a five o’clock tea and not fall over a lot of Louie Kahn’s furniture or get himself hopelessly tangled up in a hanging drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease while holding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the late Ibsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic. There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with a pair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These are also the exceptions. The great majority of us suffer visibly under such circumstances. You have the feeling that each hand weighs fully twenty-four pounds and that it is hanging out of the sleeve for a distance of about one and three-quarters yards and you don’t know what to do with your hands and on the whole would feel much more comfortable and decorative if they were both sawed off at the wrists and hidden some place where you couldn’t find ’em. You have that feeling and you look it. You look as though you were working in a plaster of paris factory and were carrying home a couple of large sacks of samples. It would be grand to be a Vishnu at a five o’clock tea, but awful to be one at a church wedding.