134 SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE. 
out-door employment. ras 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- 
