THE AUTHOR IN HIS BOYHOOD 258

MY DESK, MADE AND USED AT THE WISCONSIN STATE UNIVERSITY 284




_The Story of My Boyhood and Youth_

I

A BOYHOOD IN SCOTLAND

Earliest Recollections--The "Dandy Doctor" Terror--Deeds of
Daring--The Savagery of Boys--School and
Fighting--Birds'-nesting.


When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild,
and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and
wild creatures. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the
stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the
land lay in smooth cultivation. With red-blooded playmates, wild as
myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and
along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds,
eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and
best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black
headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and
the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We
never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old