Uneasy Money by P. G. Wodehouse

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious. Dudley Pickering had escaped boyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it. It is true that for a few years after leaving the cradle he had exhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put on knickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that. He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually lies between the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtful and sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an old fogy. A love of machinery, developing early, helped the steadying process. While other boys were breaking windows or laying the foundations for home runs and flying tackles that would afterward enable them to pass with credit through college, Dudley Pickering was scrutinizing engines, studying textbooks, talking on terms of grave equality with mechanicians.

And now -- thirty-odd years overdue -- boyhood had come upon him. As he examined the revolver in his bedroom wild and unfamiliar emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as thoroughly in its control as ever he had had his Pickering Giant.