ntry, nearly level,
the utmost elevation getting hardly a couple of hundred feet above
tidewater mark; a country with less natural beauty than belongs to most
New England towns,--bare, bleak, rocky, with stunted vegetation and
ungenial soil. Yet within its limits there are brooks and marshes and
copses and woodlands,--rocks over which the wild columbine hangs its
fuchsia-like pendants, and dells where nestle the earliest and sweetest
of the wood-flowerets.

And now to come back to the miserable sinner. As schoolboy, as
bank-clerk, as teacher, as worker in many ways, he has unemployed
leisure in the hours of daylight,--not so many as he should have,
perhaps, but still many hours in the course of the month. Shall he go to
the livery-stable, the bowling-alley, or the billiard-saloon? Not being
a saint, of course he can plead no high-toned sense of need of physical
culture, to warrant these indulgences. He goes because he likes it, gets
enjoyment, exercise, rest for a mind tasked to the full with the day's
work. This he ought to have; and if butting little ivory balls about or
propelling big wooden ones will give it him, let him have it, if so be
that it cannot be got otherwise. There is no contamination in the cue or
the ten-pin; but there is in the habits and associations of the places
where they are found. Let us not be maw-wormish about it, but tell the
truth as it is. The quasi-gambling principle upon which all such places
are conducted stimulates the love of hazard and makes way for the
betting propensity to become full-blown. Of course, one can bet, if one
have money; two lumps of sugar and a few flies will enable a man to lose
the fortune of the Rothschilds, if he will. That is not the question.
The billiard-saloons do educate men for the gambling-house, simply
because they cannot go to them without either losing their money or
winning their games. Beside that, the gaseous, dusty, confined, and
tobacco-scented air of those places is not to be compared with our free,
open, out-doors hills and meadows, for any hygienic purposes.

But, argument apart, there is a sad New England story, so often repeated
as to be almost wearisome, were it not so sad. It is of the fresh,
frank, honest-hearted boy, who may be seen behind many a bank-counter.
At first, so active, trustworthy, and trusted,--yet with the constant
temptation of unemployed time and energies demanding supply of action.
Little by little these are supplied,--supp