nest
which has been carefully preserved for this eventful hour, and which is
to be besieged with boiling water, gunpowder, and other engines of
warfare. Thus the schoolboy's first days at home are a glorious hour of
crowded sport.

It cannot be denied that, as the holidays go on, a biggish boy sometimes
finds time hang heavy on his hands, while his father and mother find him
hang heavy on theirs. The first excitement rubs off. The fun of getting
up handicap races among children under twelve years of age wears away.
One cannot always be taking wasps' nests. Of course there are many happy
boys who live in the country, and pursue the pleasures of manhood with
the zest of extreme youth. Before they are fourteen, they have a rod on
a salmon river, a gun on a moor, horses and yachts, and boats at their
will, with keepers and gillies to do their bidding. Others, not so much
indulged by fortune and fond parents, live at least among hills and
streams, or by the sea. They are never "in the way," for they are always
in the open air. Their summer holidays may be things to look back upon
all through life. Natural history, and the beauty of solitary nature;
the joys of the swimmer in deep river pools shut in with cool grey walls
of rock, and fringed with fern; the loveliness of the high table lands,
and the intense hush that follows sunset by the trout stream--these
things are theirs, and become a part of their consciousness. In later
and wearier years these spectacles will flash before their eyes unbidden,
they will see the water dimpled by rising trout, and watch the cattle
stealing through the ford, and disappearing, grey shapes, in the grey of
the hills.

In boyhood, the legends that cling to ancient castles where only a shell
of stone is standing, and to the ash-trees that grow by the feudal
gateway, and supplied the wood for spear shafts--these and all the
stories of red men that haunt the moors, and of kelpies that make their
dwelling in the waters, become very real to us when standing in the dusk
by a moorland loch. If some otter or great fish breaks the water and the
stillness with a sudden splash, a boy feels a romantic thrill, a pause of
expectation, that later he will never experience. "The thoughts of a boy
are long, long thoughts," says the poet; he thinks them out by himself on
the downs, or the hills, and tells them to nobody.

If we all lived in the country, the advent of boys would not be a thing
to c