lead astray. As resistlessly as the winter, with snowflake upon
snowflake, had buried all the delightful vagaries of summer, so this
man, in his passion for Knowledge, would have buried all the charming
inconsistencies, the beautiful inaccuracies, the lovely pretenses of
Life. The illusions, the sentiment, the fancies, the poetry of Life,
he would have buried under the icy sameness of his facts, even as the
flowers and grasses were hidden under winter's shroud of snow. But he
could not. Under the snow, summer still lived. Under the cold facts of
Life, the tender sentiments, the fond fancies, the dear illusions have
strength even as the flowers and grasses.

I do not know what it was that brought it about. It does not matter
what it was. Perhaps it was the sight of some boys coasting down a
little hill, on a side street, near where the man lived at this time:
perhaps it was a group of children who, on their way home from school,
were waging a merry snow fight: or, perhaps, it was the man's own
effort to acquire Knowledge: or, it may be, that his brain was weary,
that the way of Knowledge seemed over long, that the links in the
golden chain were many and passed all too slowly through his hand--I
do not know--but, whatever it was that did it, the man, as he sat
before his fire that winter evening with a too solid and substantial
book, slipped away from his grown up world of facts back into the no
less real world of childhood, back into his Yesterdays--to a school
day in his Yesterdays.

Once again he made his way in the morning to the little schoolhouse
that stood half way up a long hill, in the edge of a bit of timber,
nearly two miles from his home. The yard, beaten smooth and hard by
many bare and childish feet, was separated from the timber by a rail
fence but was left open in front to any stray horses or cattle that,