2 THROUGH GLADE AND MEAD. 
are changed with them,— Collier's “History of English 
Literature” was the text-book put into the hands of my 
class, and its first sentence, repeated until branded into 
the memory and haunting it ever afterwards, florid as 
it was in style, had an indefinable charm for our crude 
youthful taste, while it conveyed dimly to our minds 
the intimate connection between outdoor life and the 
beginnings of literature and art. 
It ran as follows: ‘“‘When in the depths of some 
Asiatic forest, shadowy with the green fans and sword- 
blades of the palm-tribe and the giant fronds of the 
purple-streaked banana, a sinewy savage stood, one day 
long ago, etching with a thorn on some thick-fleshed 
leaf, torn from the luxuriant shrub-wood around him, 
rude images of the beasts he hunted or the arrows he 
shot, the first step was taken toward the making of a 
book.” Numerous as have been the changes since 
those far-off days our language has preserved the fact 
that the tree, the beech tree probably, is the parent of 
the book, the leaf of the tree is the ancestor of the leaf 
of the book, the papyrus of the Nile. Valley has given 
us the name for paper, and the Latin word for feather, 
penna, has given us our word for pen. 
The literature of every people is redolent with the 
odor of outdoor life, as the forms and means by which 
it has been preserved speak of its outdoor origin. In 
the early development of our race we see the effect of 
