tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open
air--would have cured me of my love of nature. For love is the main
thing, the prime thing, and to train the eye and ear and acquaint
one with the spirit of the great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot
of minute facts about nature, is, or should be, the object of
nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy of the frog? But to
know the live frog--his place in the season and the landscape,
and his life-history--is something. If I wanted to instill the love
of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first place,
through country life, and, in the next place, through the best
literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through
books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature. Biology is all
right for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the
mass of pupils, it is a waste of time. Love of nature cannot be
commanded or taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated.


Sweet were the days of my youth! How I love to recall them and
dwell upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a
gulf like that of sidereal space. The old farm bending over the
hills and dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams,
the springs, the mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings
I was so protected, and all my brothers and sisters-how precious
the thought of them all! Can the old farm ever mean to future boys
what it meant to me, and enter so deeply into their lives? No doubt
it can, hard as it is to believe it. The "Bundle place," the "barn
on the hill," the "Deacon woods," the clover meadow, the "turn in
the road," the burying-ground, the sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the
sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the "old-barn meadow," and so on
through the list--each field and section of the farm had to me an