we
looked up to as gods. Fortunate is he who bears with him into the
life-struggle pure memories of a happy home. When I think of the bees I
have seen coming back to the hive, honey-laden, in the golden light of
setting suns, when I was a boy at home, a feeling comes over me as
though I had lived in paradise and been driven forth into a bleak
world. When one is young, and one's father and mother are full of health
and joy; when the roses are blooming and the brooks are laughing to
themselves from simple gladness, and the floating clouds and the silent
stars seem to have human thoughts,--what more could we ask of God but to
know that all this is eternal, and is from him?

In such a mood, how easy it is to turn the childlike soul to the world
of spiritual and immortal things. With what efficacy then a mother's
soft voice teaches us that we were born upon this earth for no other
purpose than to know truth, to love goodness, to do right, that so,
having made ourselves godlike, we may forever be with God. And if these
high lessons blend in our thought with memories which make home a type
of heaven, how shall they not through life be a spur to noble endeavor
to accomplish the task thus set us? When great-hearted, high-souled boys
go forth to college from homes of intelligence and love, then is there
well-founded hope that they shall grow to be wise and helpful men, who
know and teach truth, who see and create beauty, who do and make others
do what becomes a man. Of hardly less importance is the neighborhood in
which our early years are passed, and next to the companionship of the
home fireside, a boy's best neighbor is Nature. Well for him shall it
be, if, like colts and calves, and all happy young things, he is
permitted to breath the wholesome air of woods and fields, to drink from
flowing streams, to lie in the shade of trees on the green sward, or to
stand alone beneath the silent starlit heavens until the thought and
feeling of the infinite and eternal sink deep into his soul, and make it
impossible that he should ever look upon the universe of time and space,
or the universe of duty's law within his breast, in a shallow or
irreverent spirit. Little shall be said to him, and little shall he
speak, and to the unobservant he shall seem dull; but he is Nature's
nursling, and she paints her colors on his brain and infuses her
strength into his heart. She hardens him and teaches him patience; she
shows him real things, fills