My Boyhood and Touth 



Alighting gently, as if afraid to waste the dew, 

 they would pause and fidget as they do before 

 beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter 

 the drops in showers and get as thorough a 

 bath as they would in a pool. I have also seen 

 the same kind of baths taken by birds on the 

 boughs of silver firs on the edge of a glacier 

 meadow, but nowhere have I seen the dew- 

 drops so abundant as on the Monterey cypress ; 

 and the picture made by the quivering wings 

 and irised dew was memorably beautiful. 

 Children, too, make fine pictures plashing and 

 crowing in their little tubs. How widely differ- 

 ent from wallowing pigs, bathing with great 

 show of comfort and rubbing themselves dry 

 against rough-barked trees! 



Some of our own species seem fairly to dread 

 the touch of water. When the necessity of ab- 

 solute cleanliness by means of frequent baths 

 was being preached by a friend who had been 

 reading Combe's Physiology, in which he had 

 learned something of the wonders of the skin 

 with its millions of pores that had to be kept 

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