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Their meek, soft, loving light Falls like a gleam of holiness Upon my heart tonight."

That great truth which Gray tells us he discovered for himself, and which very few people learn, till they find it by experience, went to my heart, that in this world a human being never can have more than one mother.

It is a peculiar expression that people use when they say that they "keep" Lent, or "keep" Sunday, or "keep" Christmas, or "keep" a birthday. They mean that they observe it, and by thus marking it they get something out of it which is pleasant and suggestive. We all have our little festivals, life's private anniversaries, these jubilees of the heart which we love to celebrate. That day is a high day, when the old homestead becomes an inspiration point. Stores, long ago laid by in the memory, come forth from their hiding places. In unexpected exaltation of spirit, one is lifted above himself.

He gets out of himself and lives for the hour a sort of sublime life. It was worth the trip to obtain such a revelation of my own mind. Of all the works of the Creator's power and wisdom the mind bears most plainly the private mark of the invisible God. Things have almost a miraculous power to visualize persons. This is true to an extent that will not be believed. And here is a perplexity. Shall I insist upon the point? The incredible part is the particular thing I want to emphasize. The trundle bed, the hair-covered trunk, the stairs, the door, the window become active factors, and the faculties awaking out of long heavy slumber become vocal. Faces and tones are at once recalled and intensely vivid remembrances take shape, hue and voice. Spirits of father and mother, are ye here, entering into the high communion of this hour? The suggestiveness of the environment was such that somehow and suddenly, I was a boy again. This is such a day as that in which our parents blessed us, and such a day as that in which our mother fulfilled both of those relations to us. Her love was like spikenard, perfuming the house. Two good friends I there summoned to go with me, memory and resolution. One of these friends reinforces the work of the other. When I vividly remember, I want to make a consecration. I want to do some sacrificial act, and to do it distinctively for mother's sake. Now, henceforth, "No day without something learned: no day without something done." I took some live coals off the home altar to start new fires. Our ancestors had, what they styled "living" money and "dead" money. In emergencies they sought to convert dead resources into currency. My legacy is a memory and the old battered trunk which was a little world in itself.

In the days of my top and kite-hood, the trunk had constantly to be opened because something had been forgotten. How small a thing it was to contain as much as I thought there was in it. I showed my regard for it by the things I entrusted to it. The germ of every home I ever had was in it. Its contents I have almost idolized. I speak advisedly, I would rather lose the house than what, reserved from it, has come down with me through the years, taken with their setting. A boy likes a place to keep his things. A boy accumulates. That's his nature. An associate has just said that his first memory was a suit that had pockets. There is something in a boy's constitution that gives him a large use for pockets. To empty them is not a convenience, merely, but a necessity, as in his use of them they project like two bay-windows. His nature necessitates a trunk. There must be a secret spot around which can rally the sentiments that a home awakens and conserves. A mother loves to get a Bible into this trunk, which is to be the center-point to his heart and home. Mother's sentiment was well chosen. This book will keep you from sin and sin will keep you from this book. They do not go together. They do not keep company. This Bible had about it what it calls "a sweet smelling savor." A new pocket book, a gift from my grandfather, was also quite redolent but the odor of these was different.

I read in an old legend that a Damascus Blade gave forth both sparks and perfume. My sense of smell was always exceedingly acute. It has guarded me often against exposure. I can instantly detect invisible forms of peril. I knew a way to find out about those qualities of a Damascus Blade. A boy is always ready to educate himself by the use of his sense perceptions, and is particularly prompt with taste and smell. I had from the first a rare, refreshing pleasure from flowers, perfumes, aromatic materials producing a sweet odor when burned and the smell of fruits. I used to love the fragrance of new hay and of the freshly plowed ground and of the earth when moistened by a quick summer shower, the scented fumes wafted from the land when approached from the ocean, and the fishy smell of the shore when you have reached it. The odor of a well-kept light harness when well warmed up on a fine gaited horse, and the odor of the varnish on the carriage, I, to this hour, remember from my boyhood days. I loved the intensity of odors so peculiar, so unlike those of summer, that we used to notice after the frost had fallen, when the winter was at hand, and the aroma of the woods having been first imprisoned, was exhaled by a warm sun, in a cloud of incense. All the sense perceptions were wide open to the mind. We were constantly learning. Life was a school without recesses or vacations and had a full corps of instructors in all the departments.

"Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee." "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification."

THE LAND OF USED-TO-BE

The particular thing taught in the early school, as I recall it, was to make a bow. When a boy was about to speak a piece he made his manners and at the conclusion of his address he again caused his head to descend and made a quick nervous stoop. Declamation was made of three parts, two of which were the introductory bow and the concluding one. If the bow was grotesque, the speaker was recalled, not only to bow, but to do it gracefully. It is nothing to the credit of those scholars that in later life they sometimes forgot to perform the gracious act, which this master sacrificed other items to teach. The schedule, day by day, was a mere overture to the main performance which came at the end of the term which was the exhibition. This came "the last day." As the libraries were small the pupils searched high and low to find a "piece." This was a new task to those who had been simple answer-hunters. In arithmetic they were informed in advance what result they must attain and to reach it was to do their sums. But now there is involved also the human equation.

When they came "to speak in public on the stage," they were noisily dressed. They would have looked better and felt better in customary apparel, but they were ill at ease and this helped to mark a red-letter day.

The whole town was moved. The scholars were full of excitement over the glory of the occasion. The country side was deserted. The farmers with all the members of their families appeared in town. There was no room to stable the horses and so they were covered with many other articles besides blankets, there being no uniformity to their uniform. They were tied for the very long evening in the lee of some stack or shed. The boy who spoke the last piece excited great admiration, particularly, in the minds of his proud father and of his adoring mother.

"So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory's thrill is o'er, And hearts that once beat high for praise Now feel that pulse no more."

Interest in these things so then developed that Mr. Caldwell had to compose dialogues of a spicy picturesque character for our public use. He incited his scholars to enter into the spirit of their single pieces and dialogues and his exhibitions surprised and delighted the audiences so admirable became the performance of children and youth. Fine declamation was to him what painting is to an artist, or melody to the musician, it was a passion, and nerved him for effort. Scholars still live all about who can "witness if I lie." The stage afterward must have claimed many of those actors for they showed unquestioned genius for the art of theatrical representation. The conditions were primitive, but for the platform we must have curtains, so when the eventful moment came, sheets and table-cloths instead were pulled aside, these being the only curtains that were available and we had to live with what we had. The "stage properties" were hastily gathered from the homes of participants.

As the parents attended these exhibitions, the contagion caught them and then followed the lyceum. It swept the town, it was the most popular thing ever. I distinctly remember the evening when they discussed Neal Dow's Maine liquor law, my father participating. One of our neighbors carried the honor of out-talking the whole field. Let his thoughts slide into the familiar current and they flowed on easily and indefinitely. For debate they caught at Bulwer's dramatic sentence, The pen is mightier than the sword, and they argued the pros and cons without getting a verdict, leaving thus to Germany and the Allies to bring the time honored discussion to an end with a demonstration that no one will ever be able effectively to question. To these meetings each man brought a candle but no candle-stick. From the lighted end, he would drop a little tallow on the desk, and thus set up the candle, that it would give light to all that were in the house. What a sight greeted us the next morning.

"The Isles of Greece! The Isles of Greece!"

Friction matches, which according to Faraday, were the most useful invention of the age were not then sold, loose in boxes, but were made in cards, each match being detached only a part of its length from the others which stood with it in a thin layer of wood. The word, Lyceum, marks an era in the United States. It means a great school of debate, a college that grants no degrees. It gives me a sadness that is not akin to pain, to hear a young person designate a building as Lyceum Hall, using the word as if it were Grampian Hall or Hamilton Hall, having no glorious, clear conception of what the name of the hall signified to the early community. Tradesmen, farmers, professional men, themselves readers and thinkers, above all restless and eager disputants would meet night after night to discuss the unselfish problems of life. At first they were not allowed to speak upon irritable subjects. They tried to escape both the Scylla and the Charybdis of religious and political contentions, but in early days narrow was the way. Some sanguine souls sought to build a suspension bridge over the foaming waters of controversy and to find a way of union for the bitter strife and dissension that only cases of conscience can supply. This little community-university was co-educational. The women too were welcomed, not only to the meeting where their presence was a stimulus to the debaters, but to participation in the conduct of the lyceum paper, which, read by one of the sterner sex, often contained contributions by the women. In it were witty conundrums, based on local names and conditions, pointed suggestions, humorous hits at the hardships they were at the moment experiencing, which enabled the people to laugh at their own privations. Deep feeling and marked literary ability were often shown in the contributions to this unprinted paper. It was for just such pages as these that the first poems of Lucy Larcom were produced, and she says that if she had learned anything by living it was that education may proceed "not through book learning alone, sometimes entirely without it."

The outstanding feature of the lyceum was the report of the critic. He must be a bright glad witty man without a shade of vulgarity, a perfect master of all those nice little arts which give zest to conversation and a quaint coloring and a good deal of it, to his thoughts. I have a pleasant record of him. His chief theme was always, The Ladies. No one of them could do anything poorly enough to get anything but a warm encomium. If the debaters did well it was because the ladies by their presence gave just such cheer as bands of music contributed to Napoleon's army, when getting their heavy cannon over St. Bernard Pass. This critic never had the affrontery to lecture the participants. "Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?" Mathew Arnold came over here to lecture us, from the know-it-all point of view, and began his work without any specific preparation for any evening, discussing no sympathetic theme, and the people declined to hear. The great benefit of the lyceum, to say the least of it, was that the whole conduct of it rested solidly on the men who blended in it and habitually attended it. It came right up out of the intellectual force, the convictions, the good neighborhood feeling and intelligence of the community. These debates developed leaders in the various departments of mental effort. It sent debaters straight into the State legislature. It was like running a magnet over a dust heap, in that it revealed metal, and drew it out, and this was what people were looking for. Any one who looks over the surface of our towns finds many minds, endowed by nature with brilliant faculties and framed by their Creator for great usefulness and honor, waiting to have their energies awakened and invigorated.

The thing that made the lyceum was in the air. What is discussed now in the papers was then a theme for argument, evenings, in the stores and taverns. Our word caucus, is derived from the Caulkers, ship-builders, hardy, upright efficient men who gave tone and character to the meeting that they with others held, to discuss politics and the other live issues of the day. To increase the number of parts taken, certain grave, slow men, not likely to share in the discussions, noted chiefly for their moderation and caution, were named in advance as judges, and their decision was to be based first, on the weight of argument, and then on the merits of the question. To keep up the excitement, the decision was sometimes appealed to the house. If I close my eyes and open the chambers of memory I distinctly see the young men, with many signs of diffidence rising timidly to participate in the proceedings. At the earlier meeting, two persons had been appointed to maintain the affirmative and two other members were requested to maintain the negative. The free-for-all fray was let loose with the old time question, Does any one desire to debate that question? Sometimes we had "rough house" which was always followed at the next meeting of the lyceum by a capacity audience. As Samson found the honey, so these lyceums discovered talent where it would be looked for least. Men came to look for good in each other under these conditions, and that helped some. And there is a partial explanation of the fact that so many men, who became prominent in early politics, were from small towns. Great opportunity was given for discovering and developing latent literary and oratorical talent and for invigorating and confirming every germ of reform and political aspiration. Leaders were discovered in the various departments of investigation and of influence. It must be kept in mind that the communities were to an exceptional degree homogeneous and over-whelmingly American.

I never look upon the panorama of the past where vivid life forms have lost little of their original distinctness without thinking of the village oracles who exercised their eloquence in these local, free schools of debate. They gave a permanent bias and coloring to the genius and taste and style, in all their subsequent years, to men distinguished for their talents, whom the lyceums discovered and trained, who shone splendidly in after life. To find the place of the lyceum in the evolution of the debaters, we will eliminate genius. To draw a rude likeness was once genius. In mechanics genius ceased to be recognized as soon as labor could equal the result, once attributed to nature's gift, acting unaided. Whittier tells us that when he began life verse-making was a monopoly. Good citizenship is not a gift or an inheritance any more than is good soldiering. Courage alone does not make the soldier nor honesty alone the citizen. Training is essential to both. In the recent constitutional convention held in Massachusetts those who worked like Trojans, looked forward with apprehension, to the oratorical assaults, that would be made upon their results. They recognized the disproportionate advantage, but a real advantage never-the-less, of oratory, and this was not over-looked but acknowledged. For a fact, some excellent ideas went begging for the support of those who had talents and training for speaking exceptionally well. One who surpasses the ordinary standards, but a little, takes a position quite in advance of his fellows. Superiority on the race course is a matter of seconds and half-seconds. The honor bestowed by us on excellence in public address is greater than that attributed to men in literature or the professions, in business, or invention. The difference becomes so plain and is so conspicuous that it gains attention. The ablest speaker arouses the sympathies and gains the result. Where a cause is to be presented I have heard this formula. A poor cause, a good speaker. A good cause, any speaker. All of us have been present when a fine speaker having what may be called the wit of speech where a laugh was loaded with a principle where the address was clear, sparkling, above all things witty, wit being the rarest of qualities and surest of appreciation, the audience worked up by the rough and ready eloquence of a popular orator, reaching indeed an extraordinary pitch of excitement, has swept everything with the weaker side of the case. No accomplishment gains consideration for its possessor and his cause so speedily as public speaking. When billions were being raised in Liberty Loans, during the German war, the telling factor was the four-minute speakers that came out of the Phillips debating societies in the various communities, and these speakers having come to the front show some disposition to remain there.

Here is brought to light the reason, that those northern states in which these elementary schools of patriotism and freedom have existed, cling so tenaciously, for local government, to the old town meeting. In this country where the motive power is public opinion, the ability to help in forming it is greatly to be coveted. The power of the lyceum would be instantly admitted, if we could use it for a moment as a negative quantity, and show how completely unfitted for public work many of our strongest factors would have been, had these little schools of oratory never opened their doors. I share in the well expressed opinion that there are four kinds of human activity for which a man must have a natural preparation, music, the sculptor's art, the painter's art, these three, and the highest forms of oratory. For these, most successful men must have aptitude. But to a person with the gift of utterance, occasion must say, Oratory, come forth! Money does not talk. Culture not wealth is the mark of distinction. Take a man whose father was poor and also the descendant of poor men with all their ideas of life associated with conditions of extreme poverty. The atmosphere and practices were such that Henry Wilson besought the legislature to change his name from Jeremiah Jones Colbaith to that one that he made famous as United States senator and as vice-president being elected on the ticket with Grant. He had known what it was to ask his mother for bread when she had none to give. Before he was twenty-one he had never had but two dollars and had never spent more than one dollar. At the end of an eleven years' apprenticeship to a farmer, he received a yoke of oxen and six sheep which he sold for eighty-four dollars. During these eleven years he never had more than twelve months schooling. The turning point in his life was the lyceum which he attended, following the lines of argument, but lacking courage to share in the debate. But one evening when the discussion was thrown open to the audience he engaged in it to the delight of his friends. His pastor called upon him and expressed his gratification and the lyceum increased in popularity as a place to hear him. His pastor urged him to seek an education. The lyceum had awakened his dormant powers. His special forte, his biographer says, was extemporaneous speaking and debate. In meetings held once or twice a week he acquired the drill he needed for coming conflicts.

Henry Clay rose to fame, by a sudden impulse at the meeting of a lyceum in Lexington. He overcame timidity and embarrassment, that had oppressed him, and in this favorite forum for the display of youthful talent, first exhibited the evidence of his extraordinary powers of oratory. His hour had struck. In this school for the highest powers of debate he discovered himself. He used a very common expedient and made it great and was proud to descend from the summit of political preferment to honor that arena, such as any community can provide, in which any ambitious young man can educate himself. Both Mr. Beveridge's brilliant oratory and Dolliver's success, as the greatest campaigner America has produced, are proof, that a training field is an indispensable condition of getting results, in the study of eloquence and in the art of oratory.

SEEN THROUGH THE LONG VISTA OF DEPARTED YEARS

Can a person change his disposition? The features of children are as diverse as their faces, all have the family likeness, but each has his own peculiar temperament.

Is it the brain, and not the soul, that does the thinking? Is man a machine and not a living spirit, inhabiting a physical body? Do people speak advisedly who use the expression "Keeping soul and body together?"

Why did not the slaves in the South do more for their own emancipation?

Why does a minister use a text? This custom prevails among pulpit orators who do not believe in miracles or in the inspiration of the Scripture or in the authority of the Bible. There's a reason. What is it?

Our teachers, in faithfulness and friendship, used to stand next to our parents and are entitled to and will ever receive our most grateful recollections. They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations. On revisiting the earth there was one instructor who beside exercising a benign and stimulating personal influence had high qualities and remarkable fitness for his noble profession, whom I would cheerfully make a sabbath day's journey to honor. Let me preserve his name, S. H. Folsom. Schoolmaster was about the right word for him for he was master as well as teacher. His severity is to be attributed to the times rather than to him. It is said that a drowning man can in two minutes live over again every incident in a long and checkered career, and a boy does not doubt the possibility of such phenomena, if he has been publicly requested, by the master, to remain after school to be whipped. We all remember him with kindly feelings and there are hundreds of his pupils living who have not lost their sense of indebtedness to him.

A boy lays up nothing against a noble, faithful, patient teacher who whips him. Pain is nothing to boys. They give it, and suffer it, in their sports, many of which have penalties. They uplift tearful eyes, but it is in entreaty, and not in rage. It was from him I acquired a life-long practice of the little economies of time. We are now so interlocked with others, we are so far from living or laboring alone that our time is much disposed of by other people. "Do you ever reflect how you pass your life? If you live to seventy-two, which I hope you may, your life is passed in the following manner: an hour a day is three years. This makes twenty-seven years sleeping, nine years dressing, nine years at table, six years playing with children, nine years walking, drawing, and visiting, six years shopping, and three years quarrelling."

I now save the time I used to spend in going to the postoffice. I used to reckon how many trips would make twenty miles. Still the flight of time grieves me. I must draw tighter and tighter every string. The school that I attended was a mere vest-pocket edition of the one which, year by year, like a starling, keeps adding to the nest, on which Mr. Folsom now looks down in benediction. This building has a telephone switchboard. I recognized only the switch which in my day was a weeping willow. When a gone feeling was experienced, a boy could dig up a small coin, go to a grocery and buy a pickle, but now schools have a buffet car attachment supplied by the woman's club.

It was an unrealized deprivation, but I do not seem to remember, when I was under the ferule, the teacher's maid, such as waits upon the children at the new training school here, nor do I seem to recall the school physician, such as the city now elects, nor the piano, nor the victrola, nor do I remember any free transportation to and from school except by "punging" when we had to take what came in terms of the sleigh driver's whip.

The principle of the Declaration of Independence was taken literally that all are created equal, which makes in education a Procrustes' bed and every boy or girl in a class, supposed to be equally capable, as they were not, was to be stretched to learn lessons of equal length. They trained up a child in the "way." The way was first fixed. It was a grown up theory. They thought more of the way than of the child. The child's primitive nature had no play. The process often lost the scholar his childhood. He was robbed of his birthright. The old maxims even, also taught that anything saved from sleep was so much saved.

With his pen, Mr. Folsom could, with unerring grace, draw an eagle, put an inscription into his mouth and thus stir in his pupils astonishment and patriotic feeling. In writing he made a specialty of capital letters, which had the last touch of nicety. Any line of his writing was as neatly molded as Spencerian copy. We had thus two epochs in our school, the Ciceronian and the Spencerian periods. One was distinguished by the graces of speech, the other by waves of ink. We have always been given to understand, that if the cradles in a neighborhood were assembled the occupant of one of them would call those present to order. It is thought to be a wonder that an American is born knowing how to conduct a public meeting. He early learns how to make motions. It is instinctive to know that a motion cannot have more than two amendments offered, at the same time, and to know the order in which they must be put, the second amendment before the first. When we wonder at some of the traits of colts we are told that they are born with their peculiarities; so with boys. The crown of everything was public declamation.

All paths led to the exhibition as we have seen. Other studies were subordinated to the all absorbing preparation for it. Other branches suffered from eclipse. The taste for it became very great. It fixed the boy's bent. The men having a lyceum, the boys took the infection and even had a relapse. In our community they formed a lyceum, and among the questions discussed was this: Which is preferable, city or country life? Having the stern rule that the less favored one must also stand up I was invited at the age of ten to share in the deliberations. I became so absorbed in some of the follies, presented by my opponents, and so lost sight of the occasion, that, when called upon by name, I was startled. The boys took sides in the universal conflicts of opinion. Nobody could find rest on a fence. It was a picket fence. The ground was the only safe place to stand on. As a regiment takes on the character of its colonel, so a school in a particular degree, reflects the teacher. I cannot tell how we all came out of the craze. When penmanship was the rage and writing became epidemic the scholars developed the villainous habit of scribbling always and everywhere. As stationery was not plentiful they used the leaves and margins, not only of their own books, but those of the others. They decorated the walls and desks. As the nights were extremely cold, the ink would be turned by the frost from a liquid to a solid state. Hence the bottles were placed on the stove for thawing purposes and would sometimes decorate the ceiling or empty their contents on the stove and floor, accompanied by a detonation like that of a pistol.

The fire and the force to do great things were slumbering in Senator Wilson's soul.... "His future course of life," his biographer says, was affected by Mrs. Eastman, who handed him, when he was eight years old, a little book. "Now carry it home with you and read it entirely through and you shall have it." A book he had never owned. To him it was a golden treasure. He hurried home to read it. He coveted the prize. In seven days he called to say that he had read it from end to end. This little book, a Testament, he kept all his living days, saying, that the presentation of it was the starting point in his intellectual life. The reason, as Sir Walter Scott believed, why the passion for books so lifts up a poor boy, is that he makes himself a master of what he possesses, before he can acquire more. Queen Judith, a princess of rare accomplishment, promised a finely illuminated book of Saxon poems, to which, her son, Alfred the Great, when young had been listening with enthusiasm, to such of her sons as should the soonest be able to read them. The innate energy of those dormant talents of "the Darling of the English" was roused and he made his name the brightest that adorns Anglo-saxon history. He became the most illustrious monarch that ever filled the English throne. He founded the University of Oxford, established trial by jury, and sought to emulate the deeds, to the recital of which he so early loved to listen. It is said that when this promise of the book was made, "Alfred returning to Queen Judith, eagerly inquired if she actually intended to give the book to the person who would soonest learn to read it?" His mother repeated the promise, with a smile of joy at the question; the young prince took the book, found out an instructor, and learned to read, and soon recited all its contents to her.

Oh for some angel visitant to stir the waters of the Bethesda of self-improvement as it was once done by the use of this principle of emulation in our class in spelling. Alphabetically the scholars were called out into a line, toeing a crack in the floor. Beginning at the head of the class the master puts out the word and those who have studied their lesson pass above those who have not. It is an unequalled revelation for a boy's later life. How came I at the foot? When one boy has competitors and they attend to their business and he does not, he will gravitate downward. I had been trained in the catechism to believe that it was first Adam and then Eve, but this theory was upset, when we stood up to spell. I can still see one of those girls stick to the head of the class. Blessed be the bad roads, "kind the storm" that housed the girl, for a day, as on her return she went to the foot. At length she modestly said to the master, "Put out any word in the book and I will spell it." With such proficiency we challenged the nearest district school to a spelling match.

Before the interest began to flag, it was understood that as a final test, every body in the house should rise and spell down. With blushing honors, under the spell of emulation, this unobtrusive girl would rally her powers, and hold her timid self up to meet all comers by sheer force of a moral courage, unsurpassed by men who go over the top and look into the cannon's mouth. The audience grows breathless. She clings to her position like that which Oliver Wendell Holmes called The Last Leaf. Our best girl won. Our boys seeing any members of the defeated school would use their two palms for a trumpet and shout the pivotal word, on which our victory turned, "Phthisic." It was a great incitement to strive to equal or excel when a rival was seen to take a reward for doing what we might have done, but didn't. The name of the winner became a household word and was garlanded. I have felt depressed by my consciousness of the unworthiness of the response, that my life has made, to such an excellent instructor in penmanship and spelling. His name is embalmed in all our hearts. The terms of school soon ended. Beyond this we have no record of our eminent teacher's life and as Bunyan says of one of his characters "We saw him no more."

WHERE WE PLAYED MUMBLE-THE-PEG

It is with diffidence that I name a suggestion that has been very much on my heart since retreading these streets and revisiting these early haunts. It is to get rich, not with dollars in the purse, but deposits in the bank of memory. No other human faculty can be more rapidly and strongly and surely developed than an ability to keep things in mind. Yet many people are making use of methods that impoverish recollection. Devices are increasing for memory-saving which have the effect of memory destroying. A faculty's development is arrested from want of use. The memory has not grown, but the habit of putting things down with a pencil has developed. Our schedule of work is not unfolded in the mind and committed to memory but is committed to little slips of paper. Things are not carried in the brain but in the pocket and are in danger of being laid off with one's apparel. We feel dependent on the memoranda. Our best power, that likes to be trusted, that responds to discipline, has no growth, but wastes away instead, owing to defective nutrition, and lack of exercise. The memory falls into a stunted and partially disabled condition. That minister, the most widely read of any American clergyman, sharply points out, that a capacity falling into disuse, falls also into a dying process, and is extirpated and withdrawn. Any capacity kept under, allowed no range or play, suppressed, is soon stupefied and blunted. A man was endowed with a fine faculty, and has not turned it to account, "Take, therefore, the talent from him."

We once had to remember our errands but parents now hand to children a written list. Facts, stories, incidents are not stored in the intellect, but in a cabinet. Mental equipment, then, is all gone in the event of a fire. Instead of being thankful that the cabinet maker was preserved it would have been better to have saved the cabinet. There is more in that than in him.

In the intemperate man the better parts of his nature do not have fair play. His body is disordered, his brain confused, by a succession of trespasses. All diseases and abuses are self limited. Improvement would come, by a delivery from his baneful habit, and by strengthening his principles. Memory when respected, when it uses its wings and makes nothing of time or distance is an angel power. It is full of rural incidents and has a great deal of nature and of soul in it. The past is not altogether dead. It must be used to enable us to understand the real living history around us. Now look. Do you observe that every child has a health instinct? Intuitively it seeks the open air. A child is not fussy about the weather. Those have the best health that go out under all skies. Take notice that a child's birthright is freedom. When walking with his mother he seeks to unclasp his hand from hers and make a little detour in the grass along the way. His nature revolts at following, forever, when out for pleasure, a beaten path. Seeing real life reflected, you do not fail to notice, that in coasting, which in childhood could be called, The Great Joy, the girls take a prominent part, and there is no effort by the elders to play the spy nor block the sport. Here are boys and girls together, oblivious of sex, like a family, in beautiful, healthful, animating sport. It is remarkable that coasting keeps first place, seeing that it involves climbing up as well as sliding down. The return walk, involving a change of position, an interchange of mind, a fine spirit of comradeship, a greatly increased intake of ozone became for a fact a cordial of incredible virtue. God sets all little children playing for this. He lays the necessity of play upon them, and the restless little fellows hunger and thirst for physical activities. On a holiday the city is emptied into the country to enjoy for a few hours the true conditions of a healthy physical condition.

The bashful athlete, as if by mere chance, takes hold of the rope just opposite to the pretty girl of the party, I mean to one of the pretty girls of the party, whose ear he wishes to command. As the boys owned the sleds, the spirit of gallantry greatly promoted proprietorship, in a double runner, which was vital to the social spirit of the sport. One that could fly was the ideal aimed at. It seemed animate. It was well shod. A heavy load gave momentum. It was guided with rare judgment, watched, compared with others, improved, made to look better, until its associated owners prided themselves in it, as a thing of life and beauty and speed, as mariners do in a ship. Some people have to go abroad to find folks who seem eager for an excuse to get out, to even take their meals in the open air. The European seems chafed in his own house. He takes his supper with his family in the face of all the world, and enjoys the publicity. He walks about to see how other families are faring, and they do not resent it. It would not disturb him to take his dinner on the side-walk on Broadway. So in Southern California, nobody shuts a door. The weather, being about like our April, the barber shops and restaurants have no heat and often a strong current of air, that the natives would enjoy, came streaming in through wide-open doors and windows.

Book stores were not warmed at all. One morning at breakfast I rose and put on my overcoat, and a visitor at the next table, at the conclusion of the meal said, What part of the country do you come from, that you have to put on your overcoat? The reason those people put their doctors out of business is not alone in the climate but in their becoming accustomed to living in God's great and good out-of-doors. We could live much colder than we do, and live more largely out of doors, and reap at least some of the benefits that people gain by going abroad.

In looking over the familiar places, when revisiting the earth, that were once the haunts of the idlers of the town, I was struck by the entire absence of whittling in which they formerly engaged. Who could reckon their indebtedness to the pine, which supplied the favorite material? Each man kept in pretty good order, if he owned nothing else, a fine piece of cutlery, with a history which he had made familiar to the minds of his easy-going associates. To whittle with an edgeless knife is dull sport, hence at intervals, each loafer would lay his right foot upon his left knee, and upon the leather of his heavy boot characteristic of that day, would strop the blunt blade until he had put it again on edge.

Every loss is thought to have its compensation. If whittling is out of vogue, the benches before the boys at school are, for that reason, better preserved. A common present to a boy in that day was a pretty good knife. Boys are very imitative. They sought to whittle and would notch the school desks until their edges were serried into a semblance of a cross-cut saw. As the term of school wore on the teacher had made himself the custodian of most of the fancy hardware owned by the ingenious scholars. Not remote from the school-house door we turn aside and stand over the identical spot where we sat, with our heels wide apart, facing a chum, and played mumble-the-peg, or mumblety-peg, as the boys pronounced it.

"The boys were playing some old game, beneath that same old tree; I have forgot the name just now,--you've played the same with me, On that same spot; 'twas played with knives, by throwing so and so; The loser had a task to do,--there, twenty years ago."

As the knives were thrown from a series of positions, the winner would show himself something of the savage still, for when the loser failed to make the knife blade stick in the ground, he would, with the heavy handle of the knife, drive a peg into the ground, by a certain number of blows, which the loser was compelled to draw out with his teeth. The severity of the penalty was not in using a long peg, like a wooden tooth-pick, but a short one that could still be struck a blow or two after it was below the surface of the soil. Thus the unskillful player had to root for it, while the boys, being called together, encircled him and jeered.

The appearance and needs of this dirty-faced boy caused the whole bunch to hie away to the swimming-hole. The Romans seem always to have been looking out for places to bathe and always finding them. So with boys. Where is the boy that did not strive to get to the water? Who is there that did not, in his youth, love some stream? Here is the landscape toward which the mind, during the interval of a generation, has fondly turned. Last summer I followed the same old path to exactly the same square foot of ground on the willow-lined shore from which I had a hundred times stepped into the stream. I could locate exactly the spot where a bigger boy, who wanted to race, raised an oar and told me to jump over to lighten the boat, which I had to do, and there in deep water, as it was sink or swim, survive or perish, I paddled the best I could and learned to swim in one short, self-taught lesson.

This illustrates again the health instincts of boys which they seek to obey without knowing the why and wherefore of the feeling that impels them to bathe often. Swedenborg had to have a revelation from heaven to enable him to catch a glimpse of his malady which he ought to have known by intuition. His nature was all the time complaining, and what an expression that is when men speak of their "complaints," when by pains, which are warnings, nature is reporting her grievances at head-quarters. But the heavens were opened and Swedenborg went into ecstasy over the kindness of the angel whose message to him was a warning not to eat so much. The body shows divine workmanship as well as the soul. When young we follow nature and the result is a red-blooded, vigorous youngster, and if, as we went on in life, we had souls enough to appreciate the free air and sunlight with their health-giving properties, which are so lavishly bestowed upon us, we should better reverence the temple in which the spirit dwells. A recent association formed in Boston for the erection of a monument to Franklin, used in the picture, on their certificate of membership, the figure of Franklin with a kite leaning against him and a view of the telegraph. The kite employed by the philosopher in his experiment is a plaything of the young, while the experiment it served to make so successful, is the last word in science when applied to light, heat and transportation. The picture shows the connection between our sport and the great realities of life.

Play underlies the future responsibilities and events of life. Recreation has a direct relation to efficiency. I wish that some boys that I know would play a little more. To watch boys is to study their character. The story of a boy's life deserves to be written as well as the life of a man. A boy has been pointed out who on returning from school is seized and imprisoned in a back parlor with nothing to look at but his weary lessons. He is pining. His eye needs brightening. His blood wants reddening. An Oriental traveler, watching a game of cricket, was astonished to hear that some of those playing were rich. He asked why they did not pay some poor people to do it for them. The play will show itself in still greater riches when radical important work is undertaken and when an entire revolution in the world's methods is to be accomplished. Exercise, like mathematics, cannot be seized by might nor purchased by money. It is not true that every hour taken from a child's play is an hour saved. In some cases, where a boy is given a little time to play, it is done grudgingly. Thinking now of efficiency they hire, here, leaders to teach children to play. Vivacious representatives of the Young Women's Christian Association sent word through the little villages along the Volga that there would be games for the Russian children on the village squares. These refugee children had seen so many sorrows that they had forgotten that they were young. Whole towns turned out. They looked on in wonder. "Have you brought us bread?" they asked, as the games were about to be started. The spirit of joy had forsaken them and needed to be recalled. Little games of competition and emulation, that were mirth-producing and health-giving, gave the impression that "Some angels must have been at play." As Thoreau says of animals, so we may say of human beings, that their most important part is their anima, their vital spirit.

When revisiting the earth I met on intimate terms a classmate. I was in and out of his place of business many times. He had plenty to do. Indeed he had too much to do. The distinct impression he made upon me was, that he was being hurried, all the time, a little faster than he could well travel. Hurry, if continuous, becomes simply worry under another name. Let a person catechize his own experiences on this subject: it will have a salutary effect. He drew me into a confidential conversation, in which he said, that he was not earning a good living and asked me what I thought of his situation. I advised him at once to take a vacation and refresh his mind. He was working like a quarry slave. A person needs to stand away from a house to see it. He needed to readjust himself. His mind had lost its spring. A little recreation would do him more good, than the same time in the treadmill. Sometimes you see that a man made up what mind he has, when he was too tired; it was no proper expression of him.

What was once play has become work and what was once work in the garden, wood-yard, and barn may now become play. A person can stop work and yet not have any recreation. When a person after excessive physical exertion is resting he is not recreating. You do not say of persons at rest that "they shout for joy, they also sing." After sunset, the lonely twilight hours, with Jacob, represented the accepted, needed rest and after that came the pensive reverie, the dream and with it the ladder and the angel ministration. In his own person, every one must have noticed, that after a period of rest, often as late as Sabbath afternoon, come the holy influences of the hour, the music that is audible to the fine ear of thought, the stillness, the purity, the balm. A man, who is busy all the time or tired all the time, breaks the curfew law of God. The evening concentrates the retrospect, also the prospect of our lives. If you are communing with a confidential friend you do not like to have any body else talking in the room at the same time. You want to become attuned, like musicians, about to begin to play.

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