A Son of the City: A Story of Boy Life

The river calls to John Fletcher before the city wakes. In the gray light of early morning, he slips out to meet his friend Bill Silvey, and together they race toward the park where fishing waits. Herman Gastrell Seely captures something that feels almost extinct: the particular electricity of boyhood when a single day contains everything, when a secret expedition to a pond represents the whole of existence. This is childhood as the young experience it, full of schemes and swift movement and imaginative worlds built from ordinary things. The adults are distant authorities to evade, the stakes are small and enormous at once. For anyone who remembers the fierce joy of morning freedom, or who wants to step back into that vanished country of dawn and small adventures, this book offers a window in.