Although the country-boy feels a little joy when school breaks up (as he does when anything breaks up, or any change takes place), since he is released from the discipline and restraint of it, yet the school is his opening into the world,—­his romance.  Its opportunities for enjoyment are numberless.  He does not exactly know what he is set at books for; he takes spelling rather as an exercise for his lungs, standing up and shouting out the words with entire recklessness of consequences; he grapples doggedly with arithmetic and geography as something that must be cleared out of his way before recess, but not at all with the zest he would dig a woodchuck out of his hole.  But recess!  Was ever any enjoyment so keen as that with which a boy rushes out of the schoolhouse door for the ten minutes of recess?  He is like to burst with animal spirits; he runs like a deer; he can nearly fly; and he throws himself into play with entire self-forgetfulness, and an energy that would overturn the world if his strength were proportioned to it.  For ten minutes the world is absolutely his; the weights are taken off, restraints are loosed, and he is his own master for that brief time,—­as he never again will be if he lives to be as old as the king of Thule,—­and nobody knows how old he was.  And there is the nooning, a solid hour, in which vast projects can be carried out which have been slyly matured during the school-hours:  expeditions are undertaken; wars are begun between the Indians on one side and the settlers on the other; the military company is drilled (without uniforms or arms), or games are carried on which involve miles of running, and an expenditure of wind sufficient to spell the spelling-book through at the highest pitch.

Friendships are formed, too, which are fervent, if not enduring, and enmities contracted which are frequently “taken out” on the spot, after a rough fashion boys have of settling as they go along; cases of long credit, either in words or trade, are not frequent with boys; boot on jack-knives must be paid on the nail; and it is considered much more honorable to out with a personal grievance at once, even if the explanation is made with the fists, than to pretend fair, and then take a sneaking revenge on some concealed opportunity.  The country-boy at the district school is introduced into a wider world than he knew at home, in many ways.  Some big boy brings to school a copy of the Arabian Nights, a dog-eared copy, with cover, title-page, and the last leaves missing, which is passed around, and slyly read under the desk, and perhaps comes to the little boy whose parents disapprove of novel-reading, and have no work of fiction in the house except a pious fraud called “Six Months in a Convent,” and the latest comic almanac.  The boy’s eyes dilate as he steals some of the treasures out of the wondrous pages, and he longs to lose himself in the land of enchantment open before him.  He tells at home that he has seen the most