eration 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 undefined item in his general ideal
world, and there was no harm in letting his imagination play about
her illumined head. Since Cynthia had "got religion" and John had
got nothing, his love was tempered with a little awe and a feeling of
distance. He was not fickle, and yet I cannot say that he was not ready
to construct a new romance, in which Cynthia should be eliminated.
Nothing