In all this your new friends are men of observation; while Frank and yourself are comparatively men of reading.  In ciphering, and all schooling, you find yourself a long way before them; and you talk of problems, and foreign seas, and Latin declensions, in a way that sets them all agape.

As for the little country girls, their bare legs rather stagger your notions of propriety; nor can you wholly get over their out-of-the-way pronunciation of some of the vowels.  Frank however has a little cousin,—­a toddling, wee thing, some seven years your junior, who has a rich eye for an infant.  But, alas, its color means nothing; poor Fanny is stone-blind!  Your pity leans toward her strangely, as she feels her way about the old parlor; and her dark eyes wander over the wainscot, or over the clear, blue sky, with the same sad, painful vacancy.

And yet—­it is very strange!—­she does not grieve:  there is a sweet, soft smile upon her lip,—­a smile, that will come to you in your fancied troubles of after-life with a deep voice of reproach.

Altogether you grow into a liking of the country:  your boyish spirit loves its fresh, bracing air, and the sparkles of dew that at sunrise cover the hills with diamonds; and the wild river, with its black-topped, loitering pools; and the shaggy mists that lie in the nights of early autumn like unravelled clouds, lost upon the meadow.  You love the hills, climbing green and grand to the skies, or stretching away in distance their soft, blue, smoky caps, like the sweet, half-faded memories of the years behind you.  You love those oaks, tossing up their broad arms into clear heaven with a spirit and a strength that kindles your dawning pride and purposes, and that makes you yearn, as your forehead mantles with fresh blood, for a kindred spirit and a kindred strength.  Above all you love—­though you do not know it now—­the BREADTH of a country life.  In the fields of God’s planting there is ROOM.  No walls of brick and mortar cramp one; no factitious distinctions mould your habit.  The involuntary reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural.  The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent.  The boy grows into manliness, instead of growing to be like men.  He claims—­with tears almost of brotherhood—­his kinship with Nature; and he feels in the mountains his heirship to the Father of Nature!

This delirium of feeling may not find expression upon the lip of the boy; but yet it underlies his thought, and will without his consciousness give the spring to his musing dreams.

——­So it is, that, as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the old Squire’s door, you muse upon the time when some rich-lying land, with huge granaries, and cosy old mansion sleeping under the trees, shall be yours,—­when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come laughing down your pasture-lands,—­when the clouds shall shed their spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths.