VIII. 

 MY FAVOURITE SUMMER-HOUSES. 



THIS little picture carries me in memory to days of 

 boyhood. In the school vacation how sweet it was 

 to escape from tasks that were sometimes irksome to 

 all the delights of freedom, when to range through the 

 long day by the stream side was to catch a vision of 

 some paradise that always retreated as you advanced, 

 but rewarded you with new hopes of finding at the next 

 advance; when to escape into the firwood, with its sweet, 

 resiny, healthful scents, and that wonderful blue haze, to 

 gather fir cones, was indeed a second heaven. There 

 were the pools with the tadpoles too ; and the wonder 

 that dawned upon us when we found that these nonde- 

 scripts of nature were only in a transition state, that 

 they gradually threw out linrbs, and developed lungs 



160 



