My Boyhood and Youth 



Nature saw to it that besides school lessons and 

 church lessons some of her own lessons should 

 be learned, perhaps with a view to the time 

 when we should be called to wander in wildness 

 to our heart's content. Oh, the blessed en- 

 chantment of those Saturday runaways in the 

 prime of the spring ! How our young wondering 

 eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the 

 hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling 

 and tingling with the bees and glad birds and 

 glad streams! Kings may be blessed ; we were 

 glorious, we were free, school cares and 

 scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings 

 alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature's 

 glad wildness. These were my first excursions, 

 the beginnings of lifelong wanderings. 



