day seemed. He satiated himself with all the
delights of war.

XVIII

COUNTRY SCENES

It is impossible to say at what age a New England country-boy becomes
conscious that his trousers-legs are too short, and is anxious about
the part of his hair and the fit of his woman-made roundabout. These
harrowing thoughts come to him later than to the city lad. At least,
a generation ago he served a long apprenticeship with nature only for
a master, absolutely unconscious of the artificialities of life.

But I do not think his early education was neglected. And yet it is
easy to underestimate the influences that, unconsciously to him, were
expanding his mind and nursing in him heroic purposes. There was the
lovely but narrow valley, with its rapid mountain stream; there were
the great hills which he climbed, only to see other hills stretching
away to a broken and tempting horizon; there were the rocky pastures,
and the wide sweeps of forest through which the winter tempests
howled, upon which hung the haze of summer heat, over which the great
shadows of summer clouds traveled; there were the clouds themselves,
shouldering up above the peaks, hurrying across the narrow sky,--the
clouds out of which the wind came, and the lightning and the sudden
dashes of rain; and there were days when the sky was ineffably blue
and distant, a fathomless vault of heaven where the hen-hawk and the
eagle poised on outstretched wings and watched for their prey. Can
you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few
books and no contact with the great world? Do you think any city lad
could have written "Thanatopsis" at eighteen?

If you had seen John, in his short and roomy trousers and ill-used
straw hat, picking his barefooted way over the rocks along the
river-bank of a cool morning to see if an eel had "got on," you would
not have fancied that he lived in an ideal world. Nor did he
consciously. So far as he knew, he had no more sentiment than a
jack-knife. Although he loved Cynthia Rudd devotedly, and blushed
scarlet one day when his cousin found a lock of Cynthia's flaming
hair in the box where John kept his fishhooks, spruce gum, flag-root,
tickets of standing at the head, gimlet, billets-doux in blue ink, a
vile liquid in a bottle to make fish bite, and other precious
possessions, yet Cynthia's society had no attractions for him
comparable to a day's trout-fishing. She was, after all, only a
single and a very unde