where the vigor of his manhood was spent, I think of him with unspeakable tenderness; and of mother, too, who did even more than her share in the battle that they fought together.

When I was sixteen I had a strong desire to go away, for a term or two, to a boarding school in an adjoining town, and finally, reënforced by mother, obtained father's reluctant consent. The first and about the only plowing I ever did was in September in getting the farm work advanced so that I could be spared. I worked at it diligently many days; cross-plowing, I think it was, getting the ground ready for rye. But when the time came for me to go, father had changed his mind; he had been counting the cost, and concluded he could not afford it. Besides that, none of the rest of the children had had such privileges, and I was no better than they were. It was a bitter disappointment to me, but probably just as well for me that I did not go. It threw me back upon my own resources and made me determined to make the most of my home advantages.

I went that winter to the district school, studied hard, and in the spring felt qualified to teach such small fry as usually attend a summer school in the country. So I resolved to try teaching, and in April set out to look for a vacancy in an adjoining county. It was the first time I had ever seen a stage coach or had ridden upon one. I walked ten miles to the turnpike and awaited the coming of the coach. I well remember that I was under considerable excitement during the hour I hung about the stage house in the little village. I was about to begin a forty-mile journey in a public conveyance, and just how to deport myself, and what would be expected of me as a passenger in an imposing four-horse stage coach, were important questions. But I got along very well. The great chariot that rolled and thundered so proudly through these sequestered valleys did not quite overwhelm me, but put me down safely in the afternoon at my destination.

After looking about for a few days I found what I was in quest of a district in want of a teacher and willing to give me

a trial. I returned home, and then went back and began the school in two or three weeks. I engaged to teach for ten dollars a month for the first month, and eleven dollars thereafter for six months, if I suited, and "board around." The trial month was satisfactory, and I stuck to it for the six months. I had never before been from home but a few days at a time, and how homesick I became during some of those long spring and summer days, only few of my young readers can perhaps understand.

But the end came at last, and I went back home in the fall with more than fifty dollars in my pocket, all of my own earning. That winter I went to the seminary and paid my own way, and learned and experienced many things, and was much better qualified to teach the same school again, which I was engaged to do the following fall, at just double my former wages.

Recently, in driving through the country (after an absence of more than thirty years), I went out of my way to look again upon the scenes of my early experience in teach

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ing a district school. How strange and melancholy the country looked to meso much rougher and poorer than I had thought it to be! And the houses, too, many of which were yet standing as I had left them, how small and poor they looked! Probably if they had possessed eyes, I should have looked small and poor. to them, also. We had all been young together, and we know that nothing magnifies and exalts like youth.

I knew that all the old people whom I had known were gone, and many of the younger ones, too. I saw no face that I knew. Yes, there comes one of my barefoot schoolboys, Alonzo Davis, the very lad I once knew so well. It quite startled me; the same open, bright blue eyes, the short nose, the round face, and the brisk nonchalant air an exact copy of his father at that age. He passed by without regarding me, but how my eye dwelt upon him, and how much he brought up before me of which he had no knowledge! My Alonzo was a gray-haired man; I probably saw him in a field cutting corn, but in his boy

I again saw him exactly as he was a third of a century before.

I was not much of a student of the birds or of nature during those years. As a farm boy I had known all the common birds well, and had loved the woods and the fields passionately; but my attention was not seriously turned to natural history till I was a man grown. But no one starts in the study of natural history with such advantages as he whose youth was passed on the farm. He has already got a great deal of it in his blood and bones; he has grown up in right relations with bird and beast; the study comes easily and naturally to him. The main things are a love of nature and simple tastes; and who so likely to have these as the boy from the farm?

JOHN BURROUGHS. Abridged.

SALUTATION OF THE DAWN

LISTEN to the exhortation of the dawn!

Look to this day!

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course lie all the