“I saw you this time,” said the teacher.

“Saw me what?” said the boy innocently.

“Bite that apple,” replied the teacher.

“No, sir,” said the rascal.

“Open your mouth;” and from its depths the teacher, with his thumb and finger, took out the piece of apple.

“Did n’t know it was there,” said the boy, unabashed.

Nearly all the moral sentiment and graces are late in maturing in the boy.  He has no proper self-respect till past his majority.  Of course there are exceptions, but they are mostly windfalls.  The good boys die young.  We lament the wickedness and thoughtlessness of the young vagabonds at the same time that we know it is mainly the acridity and bitterness of the unripe fruit that we are lamenting.

III A BIRD MEDLEY

People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how much they miss.  Especially to one living in the country, of strong local attachments and an observing turn of mind, does an acquaintance with the birds form a close and invaluable tie.  The only time I saw Thomas Carlyle, I remember his relating, apropos of this subject, that in his earlier days he was sent on a journey to a distant town on some business that gave him much bother and vexation, and that on his way back home, forlorn and dejected, he suddenly heard the larks singing all about him,—­soaring and singing, just as they did about his father’s fields, and it comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.

Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from their own lives.  Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds.  I go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,—­to plant myself upon unfamiliar ground.  I know nobody, and nobody knows me.  The roads, the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange.  I look wistfully upon them, but they know me not.  They give back nothing to my yearning gaze.  But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar birds,—­the same ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my youth,—­robins, sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes, meadowlarks, all there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the old associations.  Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before I have taken root at all, they are thoroughly established.  I do not yet know what kind of apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity of a decayed limb, the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on that branch, the social sparrow is busy with hairs and straws.  The robins have tasted the quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have known every red cedar on the place these many years.  While my house is yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her exquisite mossy nest on a projecting stone beneath the eaves, a robin has filled a niche in the wall with mud and dry grass, the chimney swallows are going out and in the chimney, and a pair of house wrens are at home in a snug cavity over the door, and, during an April snowstorm, a number of hermit thrushes have taken shelter in my unfinished chambers.  Indeed, I am in the midst of friends before I fairly know it.  The place is not so new as I had thought.  It is already old; the birds have supplied the memories of many decades of years.