is
hopes and aspirations are all directed to one object, trained to flow in
a dark and narrow channel, on which the sunbeams never play, and which
the pure breath of Nature never visits. His brothers and sisters have a
thousand things to talk about and think about which he has no part in.
If he joins in their games, it is still as the _abbatino_: the formal
small-clothes and narrow neckband and three-cornered hat that contrast
so strongly with their gay dresses are ever present to remind him and
them that they have different paths to travel, and have already entered
upon them. It is a dreary process that education of his, and one that
makes your heart ache to look upon. A rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed boy,
with boyish blood in his veins, running through them quick and warm, and
every now and then making them tingle with some boyish longing that will
out, although he is a priest in miniature and a Pope in prospective. I
never could look at it without thinking of the gardener, in the fulness
of his topiary pride, cutting trees and shrubs into towers and walls,
and every shape but that which Nature designed them for. Clip, clip, go
the long, scythe-like shears, and with every clip down comes a branch
with its thousand songs unsung, or a shoot with its half-blown promise
of spring. Cut away earnestly, patiently. You have your faith to help
you; and though your eyes are of the strongest and keenest, you have
never been taught to use them. Cut away till your arms ache and your
head swims with the strain of measuring angles and inches and pyramids
and obelisks; Nature is working at the root while you are warring on the
branches. True, the birds will not build where your shears have passed;
and the winds will wail where they would have piped it merrily, if the
young boughs had been there to dance to their breathings. But the roots
are tough and the trunks are strong, and the sap wells surely up from
those mysterious sources where, in darkness and silence, Nature works
her wondrous transformations,--proving, through each waxing and waning
year, by bud and leaf and branch, that, thwart and mutilate and deny her
as you may, she is the same kind mother still.

As life advances, the dividing lines grow sharper and more defined. He
has got his Latin, and, in getting it, read Virgil and Horace and
Cicero, as his brothers did. But henceforth St. Augustine becomes his
Cicero; and he already begins to suspect that the best service his Homer