ature study is better developed in the public schools
to-day than it was in my time. I remember my teacher in the Chelsea
grammar school who encouraged us to look for different kinds of
grasses in the empty lots near home, and to bring to school samples of
the cereals we found in our mothers' pantries. I brought the grasses
and cereals, as I did everything the teacher ordered, but I was
content when nature study was over and the arithmetic lesson began. I
was not interested, and the teacher did not make it interesting.

In the boys' books I was fond of reading I came across all sorts of
heroes, and I sympathized with them all. The boy who ran away to sea;
the boy who delighted in the society of ranchmen and cowboys; the
stage-struck boy, whose ambition was to drive a pasteboard chariot in
a circus; the boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn money for
books; the bad boy who played tricks on people; the clever boy who
invented amusing toys for his blind little sister--all these boys I
admired. I could put myself in the place of any one of these heroes,
and delight in their delights. But there was one sort of hero I never
could understand, and that was the boy whose favorite reading was
natural history, who kept an aquarium, collected beetles, and knew all
about a man by the name of Agassiz. This style of boy always had a
seafaring uncle, or a missionary aunt, who sent him all sorts of queer
things from China and the South Sea Islands; and the conversation
between this boy and the seafaring uncle home on a visit, I was
perfectly willing to skip. The impossible hero usually kept snakes in
a box in the barn, where his little sister was fond of playing with
her little friends. The snakes escaped at least once before the end of
the story; and the things the boy said to the frightened little girls,
about the harmless and fascinating qualities of snakes, was something
I had no patience to read.

No, I did not care for natural history. I would read about travels,
about deserts, and nameless islands, and strange peoples; but snakes
and birds and minerals and butterflies did not interest me in the
least. I visited the Natural History Museum once or twice, because it
was my way to enter every open door, so as to miss nothing that was
free to the public; but the curious monsters that filled the glass
cases and adorned the walls and ceilings failed to stir my
imagination, and the slimy things that floated in glass vessels were