Those who do make the riffle are likely to possess remarkable force and vigor. On the other hand, crowded populations hamper the spirit. They afford fewer chances for original growth. The city produces men. The country produces a man. But the child needs for companionship something more than human beings about it. It needs the fields, and trees, and rocks, and rivers, and birds, and animals tame and wild. The growing mind needs time and a chance to vegetate. The body needs free air for expansion. The typical New Yorker to-day is nearly an eighth smaller than the Middle Western State man. He is brighter mentally, but not so strong. The poverty and the hardships of a primitive country life are not calamities in the long run.

The Jacksons and the Lincolns and the Garfields and the Grants grew up under conditions greatly deflected from modern childhood; yet they survived all hindrances and disgraces, and came to significance. They came out of them in the sense that these limitations of opportunity were the making of their spirits. They grew out of them in the sense that we may not see their like again in manly force and greatness. The contributions of country life to national progress is one of the significant lessons of the

time. The gift of leaders from the rural regions has been of inestimable value to the Nation. Rough-handed countrymen led in the War of the Revolution and in placing the foundations of the Republic. Washington and Adams and Jefferson were country born. Andrew Jackson loved the Hermitage more than any other place, because it expressed the conditions and the best forces of his child-life, and added to them all the more desirable advantages of country living.

Cities to-day, as compared with the country, hold primacy of influence, but they do it through fresh infusions from country blood. The advantages to child-life in the country, as compared with the city, are very greatly superior. To have been a country bumpkin is a great investment. Not in polish, not in culture as we ordinarily understand it; not in the fineries of life, but in the broad acquisitions of physical and intellectual brawn, and in the higher moral and spiritual possibilities which God and nature can put into a man when they have him to themselves during the years of his childhood. A boy does not grow by being put into a stretcher. Furnish him good victuals, and he will look after that thing himself. The greatest and most virile forces in the personal character are not ground in by human attrition. They grow;

and for such growths there must be time for rumination. When you tell a boy to "go to grass," you advise one of the greatest things for his spirit. A boy follows not lines of thought, but lines of life. He is engaged not in mental but in heart questoning, and he gets answers that he knows not of, and will not until he reaches the celestial kingdom. A thousand unsuspected voices in the country call the soul to the companionship of spiritual things. The waters, the teeming soil, the dew, the rainfall, the storm-cloud and the lightning, the hushed breathing of all life, the cherishing warmth of the rising sun, the cold Platonic friendship of the stars,-these forbid idolatry. They do not invite worship of themselves. They lead to life, and to sympathy, and to God.

DID

CHAPTER II.

I WAS BORN,

"Up! up, my friend! and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up, my friend! and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can."

-WORDSWORTH.

ID you ever smell newly-plowed ground? Pity for the nostrils that never caught the aroma of such a field! Did you ever taste the breath of a May morning as you waded in the grass till you were wet to your neck? Were you ever in the open and fruitful fields at daybreak in the summer-time, and to remain there till dark, to see just how long a day in the country is? You city folks, you get up so late, you do not know how early the sun rises to kiss the

brow of the morning, and to clothe his child the day, and get it ready for its work.

Sunrise in the country sets the throats of the songsters to going; and takes the covering of the night from the flowers; and has everything ready for your admiration long before you are awake. There is a breath of lengthened life each morning between daylight and sun-up, but it never comes indoors. It was never known to break a lock, or blow out a smudging night-lamp, or pull a blanket from the nose of a drowsy sleeper.

Did you ever walk through the fields and pluck clover-blossoms for your mouth; and did you ever find a honey-bee in the meshes? Did you ever swim in the creek until your back was blistered in the sun? Did you ever eat persimmons before frost? Did you ever get as many black haws as you could eat? Did you ever bet six tobacco marbles with your neighbor's second boy that you could eat more green apples than he could-worms and all? Did you ever follow an A harrow all day barefooted, with a stone-bruise on your heel? Did you ever have to hold a skein of yarn while your grandmother wound it off of you on to the ball? Did you ever have to go to bed while you had your pants patched? Did you ever wear just one suspender one whole summer? Did you ever try to drive