listening to sweet song of birds. There is too much of a feeling among 

 students that it is soft, too sentimental to allow the emotions to carry 

 you away, and so they curb the least expression of appreciation and 

 animation and miss the finest of pleasures. Bookworms and students 

 of dead languages see very little in this immediate world around them. 

 They are the dullest of company to a real live person who is all glowing 

 with the real world all around. In the study of mathematics or dead 

 languages the mind creates a world of its own that is so foreign to the 

 real beautiful world all around us. We neglect the natural life and 

 crucify our very physical existence for mere memory of words. Girls 

 grow thin and spindling and pale under this unnatural pressure of 

 committing to memory words, words, words. They unsex themselves 

 and are weakened for life for the real world into which they must 

 come soon. 



So it was that the craze for a "higher education" drew me away 

 from the old farm, away from the natural life of man, into a chaotic 

 subjective world of ologies and isms that blinded and warped the mind 

 until the warm, living, throbbing world that I had left behind became 

 a matter of memory only. At first I came home often for a visit for 

 my heart was hungry for the clover fields, orchard and forest, and I 

 would ramble over the old farm trying to feel the same interest that 

 had once held me so strongly, but a change was working slowly and 

 surely and I was in grave danger of losing the emotional side of my 

 nature. I could not take the same joy in things. My memory was 

 clouded with dead things, mere rote work. Planning, expectation, 

 initiative was all gone. 



Academy days bring to mind some things that live in memory. 

 I gathered the flowers for the botany class. I won many honors in field 

 day exercises. Zoology, biology, botany and physics were of much 

 interest in the laboratory and of use. But the memory often calls to 

 mind two long braids of hair that belonged to the girl in the seat just 

 in front of me. My youthful dreams got tangled in those two long 

 braids and in after years those braids became interwoven with the 

 life work which I am to tell you about. 



After finishing the Academy, or the Academy finishing me, which 

 is too often the case, I taught country school for a few years and then 

 launched off to a four years' college course at De Pauw University, Ind. 



It is needless to dwell upon college days. They were not much 

 different from others. I became a fraternity man, was strong in field 

 day exercises, and made average grades. But through it all there was 

 a hungry heart, an aching, a void, that with all the lore of college walls 

 could not be filled. I felt that the best days of my young life were 

 slipping away and that I was not living in the truest and fullest sense 

 of the word. The dusty, badly ventilated classrooms became un- 

 bearable. 



I often dreamed of the free, glad boyhood days back close to nature. 

 Was this life fulfilling my boyhood dreams? My youthful dreams as I 

 plowed corn up and down the long rows with my bare feet in the mellow 

 earth were not of musty volumes and dingy walls, but of an open air 

 freedom with birds, and flowers, and bees, and trees, and animals. My 

 boyhood dreams were of a farm that would have the choicest creations 

 of man in both plants and animals. 



16 



