Many of them, on the same veracious authority, were peopled; some with people who were yet but monkeys like the Vielhaber's Emil; some with people now come to be human like himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could surmise.
The aging boy felt suddenly friendly with all those distant worlds, glad they were there, so almost sociably near.

On more than one of them, perhaps far off in that white streak they called the Milky Way, there must be boys like himself, learning useful things about life, to read good books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth.
Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a man.

For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation--of worlds to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were outworn--was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the ways.

His last day had been lived as a boy with publicly bare feet.
No more would he feel the soft run of new grass beneath his soles, or longer need beware the chance nail or sharp stone in the way.

On the morrow, presumably to be a day inviting to bare feet as had all the other days of his summers, remembered and forgotten, he would, when he rose, put on stockings and stout shoes; and he would put them on world without end through all the new mornings of his life, howsoever urgently with their clement airs they might solicit the older mode.