may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are
a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. With
equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will
take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to
bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of
life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than
their share of development,--the organs of thought and expression less
than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed.
A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration.
You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of
will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but
very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a large
proportion of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin
caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once
acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for
learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and
hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other.
They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls
them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes
their place, it maybe,--but you inquire a little and you find it is the
blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the
old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female
descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our
Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come
direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may, perhaps,
even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the
English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude
of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
are occasionally brought about without i