the best modern
literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was early
drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau, and to the
nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my natural-history tastes
were stimulated by them.

I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the
schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping and
prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing, tabulating, void
of free observation, and shut away from the open air--would have cured
me of my love of nature. For love is the main thing, the prime thing,
and to train the eye and ear and acquaint one with the spirit of the
great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot of minute facts about nature, is,
or should be, the object of nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy
of the frog? But to know the live frog--his place in the season and the
landscape, and his life-history--is something. If I wanted to instill
the love of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first
place, through country life, and, in the next place, through the best
literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through
books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature. Biology is all right
for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the mass of
pupils, it is a waste of time. Love of nature cannot be commanded or
taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated.

Sweet were the days of my youth! How I love to recall them and dwell
upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a gulf like
that of sidereal space. The old farm bending over the hills and
dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams, the springs, the
mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings I was so protected,
and all my brothers and sisters-how precious the thought of them all!
Can the old farm ever mean to future boys what it meant to me, and enter
so deeply into their lives? No doubt it can, hard as it is to believe
it. The "Bundle place," the "barn on the hill," the "Deacon woods,"
the clover meadow, the "turn in the road," the burying-ground, the
sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the
"old-barn meadow," and so on through the list--each field and section of
the farm had to me an atmosphere and association of its own. The long,
smooth, broad hill--a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon
the lower edge of which the house is planted--shut off the west and