es. But the electric-car, the
telephone, the bicycle, still keep avenues to the country open. Certain
it is that city people feel a growing hunger for the country,
particularly when grass begins to grow. This is a healthy taste, and
must increase the general knowledge and love of nature. Fortunate are
the little children in those schools whose teachers know and love the
world in which they live. Their young eyes are early opened to the
beauty of birds and trees and plants. Not only should we expect our
girls to have a feeling for the fine sunset or the wide-reaching
panorama of field and water, but to know something also about the less
obvious aspects of nature, its structure, its methods of work, and the
endless diversity of its parts. No one can have read Matthew Arnold's
letters to his wife, his mother, and his sister, without being struck
by the immense enjoyment he took throughout his singularly simple and
hard-working life in flowers and trees and rivers. The English lake
country had given him this happy inheritance, with everywhere its sound
of running water and its wealth of greenery. There is a close
connection between the marvellous unbroken line of English song, and
the passionate love of the Englishman for a home in the midst of birds,
trees, and green fields.

"The world is so full of a number of things,
That I think we should all be as happy as kings,"

is the opinion of everybody who knows nature as did Robert Louis
Stevenson. And so our college student may begin to know it. Let her
enter the laboratories and investigate for herself. Let her make her
delicate experiments with the blowpipe or the balance; let her track
mysterious life from one hiding-place to another; let her "name all the
birds without a gun," and make intimates of flower and fish and
butterfly--and she is dull indeed if breezy tastes do not follow her
through life, and forbid any of her days to be empty of intelligent
enjoyment. "Keep your years beautiful; make your own atmosphere," was
the parting advice of my college president, himself a living
illustration of what he said.

But it is a short step from the love of the complex and engaging world
in which we live to the love of our comrades in it. Accordingly the
third precious interest to be cultivated by the college student is an
interest in people. The scholar today is not a being who dwells apart
in his cloister, the monk's successor; he is a leader of the thought