ly all the moral sentiment and graces are late in maturing in the
boy. He has no proper self-respect till past his majority. Of course
there are exceptions, but they are mostly windfalls. The good boys
die young. We lament the wickedness and thoughtlessness of the young
vagabonds at the same time that we know it is mainly the acridity and
bitterness of the unripe fruit that we are lamenting.

III A BIRD MEDLEY

People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how much
they miss. Especially to one living in the country, of strong local
attachments and an observing turn of mind, does an acquaintance with
the birds form a close and invaluable tie. The only time I saw Thomas
Carlyle, I remember his relating, apropos of this subject, that in his
earlier days he was sent on a journey to a distant town on some business
that gave him much bother and vexation, and that on his way back home,
forlorn and dejected, he suddenly heard the larks singing all about
him,--soaring and singing, just as they did about his father's fields,
and it comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.

Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from
their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds. I
go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,--to plant myself
upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody knows me. The roads,
the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange. I look
wistfully upon them, but they know me not. They give back nothing to
my yearning gaze. But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar
birds,--the same ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my
youth,--robins, sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes,
meadowlarks, all there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the
old associations. Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before
I have taken root at all, they are thoroughly established. I do not yet
know what kind of apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity
of a decayed limb, the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on
that branch, the social sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The
robins have tasted the quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have
known every red cedar on the place these many years. While my house
is yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her
exquisite mossy nest on a projecting stone beneath the eaves, a robin
has filled a niche in the