MODERN TROGLODYTES. 41 



who has grown up in the pest atmosphere of our city tenements, 

 school-rooms, and workshops, can forget the passionate yearnings of 

 his childhood for the free air of the woods and mountains; the wild 

 outcry of his instinct against the process that inoculated him with 

 the seeds of death, and stunted the development of his most vital 

 faculties. The remorselessness of the pagan Chinese, who smother 

 the life-spark of their infants in the swift embrace of the river-god, is 

 mercy itself compared to the cruelty of Christian parents who suffo- 

 cate their children by the slow process of stinting their life-air, through 

 years and years of confinement in dungeons to which an enlightened 

 community would not even consign their malefactors. 



Honest Jean Paul relates that he used to secure a seat in a certain 

 corner of an overcrowded village schoolhouse, where a knot-hole in 

 the wall established a communication with the outer world. Through 

 this orifice he imbibed comfort and inspiration as from a flask, but 

 conceived conscientions scruples against the practice, as he never 

 could indulge without becoming conscious of a temptation to aban- 

 don his old parents and his home, and join a troop of wood-cutters or 

 gypsies, not from any vagrant tendencies, or want of dutiful sentiments, 

 but from an almost irresistible desire to make the luxury of fresh air 

 a permanent blessing. " I knew they would charge me with black 

 ingratitude, if I should run away," he says. " Good God 1 how I 

 longed to prove my affection by working for them in wind and weath- 

 er, fetching in cord-wood from the woods and splitting it into the 

 nicest, handiest pieces, carrying messages over the snow-covered 

 mountains and be back in half the time any one else could make the 

 trip do anything that would save me not from my books, but from 

 that glowing Moloch of a big stove, and that stifling, soul-stifling 

 smell of our dungeon ! " 



Even to the most inveterate believer in natural depravity this 

 might suggest a doubt whether the repugnance of children to study 

 may not be founded on a physical virtue rather than on moral per- 

 verseness. To whatever is really beneficent we are commonly drawn 

 by natural attraction, and whatever appears violently repulsive to 

 youthful minds may be justly suspected of containing more of evil 

 than of good. The very disciple of Socrates who used to run six- 

 teen miles a day to hear the dpiarog larpov (best of physicians), would 

 have hesitated to purchase physic for his soul at the price of physical 

 health; and we cannot blame our children for being unable to recon- 

 cile the precepts they hear with those they feel, and giving way now 

 and then to the more consistent and more logical prompter. 



The farmer's boy may look forward to each afternoon and each 

 summer vacation as a refreshing interlude, and to the last term of 

 his school-years as the last act of the tragedy; but in cities the end 

 of the school-room bondage is too often the beginning of the endless 

 slavery which awaits the young apprentice of the workshops, facto- 



