134 SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE. 



out-door employment. I was not lazy, but I pos- 

 sessed — well, let us call it the true aboriginal 

 temperament ; though I fear that this distinc- 

 tion will be found too subtile, even for the well- 

 educated, unless, along with their education, 

 they have a certain sympathetic bias, which, 

 after all, is the main thing to be depended on 

 in such nice psychological discriminations. 



With all my rovings in wood and field, how- 

 ever, I knew nothing of any open-air study. 

 Study was a thing of books. At school we were 

 never taught to look elsewhere for knowledge. 

 Reading and spelling, geography and grammar, 

 arithmetic and algebra, geometry and trigo- 

 nometry, — these were studied, of course, as also 

 were Latin and Greek. But none of our lessons 

 took us out of the school-room, unless it was 

 astronomy, the study of which I had nearly for- 

 gotten ; and that we pursued in the night-time, 

 when birds and plants were as though they were 

 not. I cannot recollect that any one of my teach- 

 ers ever called my attention to a natural object. 

 It seems incredible, but, so far as my memory 

 serves, I was never in the habit of observing the 

 return of the birds in the spring or their de- 

 parture in the autumn ; except, to be sure, that 

 the semi-annual flight of the ducks and geese 

 was always a pleasant excitement, more espe- 

 cially because there were several lakes (invari- 



