I feel a pity for all those folks who were born in a big city, and thus got cheated out of their childhood.  Zealous ash-box inspectors in gilt braid, prying policemen with clubs, and signs reading, “Keep Off the Grass,” are woeful things to greet the gaze of little souls fresh from God.

Last Summer six “Fresh Airs” were sent out to my farm, from the Eighth Ward.  Half an hour after their arrival, one of them, a little girl five years old, who had constituted herself mother of the party, came rushing into the house exclaiming, “Say, Mister, Jimmy Driscoll he’s walkin’ on de grass!”

I well remember the first Keep-Off-the-Grass sign I ever saw.  It was in a printed book; it wasn’t exactly a sign, only a picture of a sign, and the single excuse I could think of for such a notice was that the field was full of bumblebee-nests, and the owner, being a good man and kind, did not want barefoot boys to add bee-stings to stone-bruises.  And I never now see one of those signs but that I glance at my feet to make sure that I have shoes on.

Given the liberty of the country, the child is very near to Nature’s heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name.  He is sublimely superstitious.  His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body the soul sings and soars.

In childhood, magic and mystery lie close around us.  The world in which we live is a panorama of constantly unfolding delights, our faith in the Unknown is limitless, and the words of Job, uttered in mankind’s early morning, fit our wondering mood:  “He stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”

I am old, dearie, very old.  In my childhood much of the State of Illinois was a prairie, where wild grass waved and bowed before the breeze, like the tide of a summer sea.  I remember when “relatives” rode miles and miles in springless farm-wagons to visit cousins, taking the whole family and staying two nights and a day; when books were things to be read; when the beaver and the buffalo were not extinct; when wild pigeons came in clouds that shadowed the sun; when steamboats ran on the Sangamon; when Bishop Simpson preached; when Hell was a place, not a theory, and Heaven a locality whose fortunate inhabitants had no work to do; when Chicago newspapers were ten cents each; when cotton cloth was fifty cents a yard, and my shirt was made from a flour-sack, with the legend, “Extra XXX,” across my proud bosom, and just below the words in flaming red, “Warranted Fifty Pounds!”

The mornings usually opened with smothered protests against getting up, for country folks then were extremists in the matter of “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”  We hadn’t much wealth, nor were we very wise, but we had health to burn.  But aside from the unpleasantness of early morning, the day was full of possibilities of curious things to be found in the barn and under spreading gooseberry-bushes, or if it rained, the garret was an Alsatia unexplored.