ery New England boy does not turn out a poet, or
a missionary, or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is everything in
the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy,
and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what
the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most
fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all
the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer in literature and in
the world, a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the soil and
the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming,
that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the
desire of adventure. And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at
all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world. In the good old days,
I am told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors; the
countryboys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and
then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in foreign ports. John
used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory-tree that a little
detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the steep and
lofty pasture behind his house. He was sent to make war on the bushes
that constantly encroached upon the pastureland; but John had no
hostility to any growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied
him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree-sprouts, he
was wont to retire into his favorite post of observation and meditation.
Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying stem to which he clung was the
mast of a ship; that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves
of the sea; and that the wind which moaned over the woods and murmured
in the leaves, and now and then sent him a wide circuit in the air,
as if he had been a blackbird on the tip-top of a spruce, was an
ocean gale. What life, and action, and heroism there was to him in the
multitudinous roar of the forest, and what an eternity of existence in
the monologue of the river, which brawled far, far below him over its
wide stony bed! How the river sparkled and danced and went on, now in a
smooth amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with
that continuous busy song! John never knew that noise to cease, and he
doubted not, if he stayed here a thousand years, that same loud murmur
would fill the air.

On it went, under the wide spans of the old wooden, covered bridge,
swirling aroun