THE NATURALIST DEVELOPING. 
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those wild symphonies, with their deep, mellow, muffled roar, 
and I would rock my perilous perch in reckless sweepings, 
to and fro, until it swung me in delicious vaultings through 
the resonant tumult, like a sea-bird lifted on the storm-tossed 
waves. ; 
Many a ferruling has climbing for such a swing, or for a 
bird’s nest, cost me, savagely laid on by a brutal and captious 
pedagogue; and I hate the mean oppressor to this day! I 
was a scape-grace truant, to be sure; but God had made the 
glad sun and beautiful earth that wooed my lagging steps, and 
I should not have been bruised and scarred by a base, thick- 
blooded wretch, because I yielded an hour to their holy spell, 
and could forget, amid scenes of such enchantment, even the 
terrors of his gloomy reign. 
Verily, that “Old Field Schoolmaster” will have many 
grievous sins to answer for in his day of account. May the 
justice that shall be measured unto him be more lenient than 
any he meted out to me! 
I fought him at last, tooth and finger nails, with the scorn- 
ful but futile spite of the little warrior King Bird, caught 
napping by the claws of a carrion crow. 
I ran away to my friends, and was protected from his ven- 
geance. Dread was the ire that shook his mighty soul when 
he saw that the victim was beyond the reach of his tyranny ! 
It rose and expanded into prophecy, and he registered the 
vow before the Fates, that he would live to see me—the worst 
boy in the county—“ hanged !” 
Ha! ha! It might certainly have befallen.me, as with 
Absalom, to have been hung by the hair in a vine or tree-top, 
for daily I ran the risk in my predacious climbing, but, as 
yet, the neck of “the worst boy in the county” claims to be 
innocent of any unpleasant familiarity with hemp! May the 
shadow of that prophecy never be less! Ah, boys who loved 
the green-wood better than the horn-book, saw hard times in 
my young days. 
