ii8 Sierra Cluh Bulletin. 



BOOK REVIEWS. 



Edited by Marion Randall Parsons. 



"The Story of The life of a child among educated people to-day is 

 My Boyhood so sheltered from hardship, so protected from even 

 and Youth." * minor discomfort, that the story of this stern Scotch 

 boyhood comes to us almost like a record from a 

 different world. We read how Mr. Muir was sent to school before he 

 had "completed his third year," and how a Httle later long lessons in 

 French, Latin, and English, in spelling, history, arithmetic, and geog- 

 raphy were supplemented at home by so many Bible lessons that "by 

 the time I was eleven years of age I had about three-fourths of the Old 

 Testament and all of the New by heart." After the journey to Wis- 

 consin, for long school tasks and the sound thrashings that accom- 

 panied each mistake was substituted the unremitting toil of reclaiming 

 a farm from the wilderness — in summer time a "hard sweaty day of 

 about sixteen or seventeen hours" of heavy farm labor, where "grind- 

 ing scythes, feeding the animals, chopping stove wood and carrying 

 water up the hill from the spring" constituted the chores to be done 

 before breakfast, a mere prelude to the real work in the harvest fields ; 

 in winter, though "fuel was embarassingly abundant and cost nothing 

 but cutting and common sense . . . the only fire for the whole house 

 was the kitchen stove . . . around which in hard zero weather the 

 whole family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in the morning 

 we found socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen," "Excepting Sundays 

 we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves, the Fourth of July 

 and the First of January. Sundays were less than half our own, on 

 account of Bible lessons, Sunday School lessons and church services." 



There is much in the book to make us thankful that brighter, easier 

 lives fall to the lot of the children we now know. Yet when we con- 

 sider the discipline of mind and body, the fortitude, the rare powers of 

 concentration, the keen appreciation of the scanty hours of pleasure that 

 this harsh existence engendered, we wonder whether the indulged chil- 

 dren of to-day, satiated with amusement and ignorant of work, will at 

 three score years and ten face life with the unfaihng interest, the zest 

 of enjoyment, the unflagging intellectual activity that so distinguish 

 Mr. Muir to-day. It was a Hfe, perhaps, to deaden the ambition and 

 dull the perceptions of many a child ; but in this vigorous Scotch lad the 

 hunger to learn and create, the interest in wild nature and love of its 

 beauty rose triumphant above hard labor and time-starved opportunity. 



* The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. By John Muir. Houghton Mifflin 

 Company, Boston and New York. 191 3. With illustrations from sketches by the 

 author. 287 pages. Price, $2.00 net. 



