slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,—­his features are regular and of a certain delicacy,—­his eye is bright and quick,—­his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist’s fingers dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish.  If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men.  With equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to bodily labor.  Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of life it has lived.  The hands and feet by constant use have got more than their share of development,—­the organs of thought and expression less than their share.  The finer instincts are latent and must be developed.  A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration.  You must not expect too much of any such.  Many of them have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few of them ever become great scholars.  A scholar is, in a large proportion of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is.  He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England.  This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.  There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary.  Their names are always on some college catalogue or other.  They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out.  At last some newer name takes their place, it maybe,—­but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction.  But the reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,—­and he may, perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual classes.  The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it.  There are natural filters as well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges.