THE COUNTRY CHILD.
THE town-bred child haa nothing to replace that vista of dreams which the country child can retrieve at will. He moves in set and ordered ways, even as the stars in their courses. Certain walks he goes, demure and restricted; he trots sedately beside his nurse, or lays a gloved hand in hers. Shouting and running are forbidden. Shops, and people, and traffic, in eternal monotony of noise and hurry, are all that is offered for his outdoor consideration. The sunset is shut from_hini behind bricks and mortar. The stars he has
only seen by stealth through curtained windows. Dew is a matter he cannot comprehend ; snow is something of a peculiar and adhesive dirtiness. Trees there are, and grass. plots, but they have neither scent nor significance for him. The flowers in the parks and squares are under a regime as orderly as his own, appearing with punctual precision in their appointed times, even as he comes down to dessert o' nights. Birds mean sparrows; there are others mentioned in rhymes and fairy-tales, but he has never met them, any more than dwarfs or talking cats. In his nursery, of course, he romps and roysters ; but the whole breadth and depth of outdoor life are denied to him. All his years, what- ever he may achieve or enjoy, he will be vacant of those glorious gains, barren of those golden memories, which are the inalienable heritage of his country cousin.
Meanwhile the country child is laying up a store of reminiscence that will be a companion to him to his latest hour. The seasons are no empty names to him; each has its unique and proper delights; none is inferior to another. Day and night are his, especially that luminous mystery of summer night which is the haunt of vague romantic visions. The sunrise he knows, and the sunset, and all the unimaginable expanses of bare heaven, visible from rim to rim. He is far-sighted, because there are such un- trammelled distances for his sight to travel ; and yet he may be a keen observer of minute detail, expert in the tiny variations of insects, birds, and flowers. At four or five years old his sense of adventure wakes irrepressible, leading him into paths of peril and punishment, and runaway episodes with impotent conclusions. He may shout and gambol unchallenged along the leafy lanes, his legs and his lungs vying in exuberant vitality, none to say him nay. The procession of the months goes past him, fraught with boundless possibilities of event. Snowballing is a cleanly and exhilarating sport; an inverted chair makes an excellent sledge ; glossy black regions of untrodden ice offer prospects of skating and sliding, very different from the muddy pandemonium of a London pond. He counts the signs and tokens of spring, and is not ashamed to go a-primrosing. The whole joyous circumstance of bird's-nesting lies an open book before him; his legs may be full of furze-pricks and his coat of rents, but there are precious eggs in his pocket-handkerchief. He is knowledgable in the ways of feathered folk, and the rusty leaves at the foot of the oak-tree do not conceal from him the nightingale's olive-coloured eggs. While his sisters are weaving daisy. chains or tossing cowslip-balls, he is immersed in the pre- carious ecstasy of hunting pig-nuts; or he is away with elder boys to the trout-stream, to return rosily triumphant. He excavates piratical caves in the stuidpit, or jogs a-see-saw on deftly poised timber. His little garden claims devoted atten- tion: he is an adept with rake and hoe, and carries his first- fruits of cress and radishes in proud tribute to a prouder mother.
During the cooler weather his kite and hoop are never long in abeyance; but as the summer heats begin he constructs bowers and tree-platforms to dwell in (for man is naturally arboreal), where one may sit and prepare lessons, or carouse on home-made toffee in glorious unabashed stickiness. While still quite small he plays " shop " in the garden, volubly chaffering with beans for currency ; a little older, he keeps rabbits and bantams of his own, and surreptitiously rides the pony bare-back. He drives forth with his brethren in little donkey-carts, exploring distant lands across the hills. Presently hay-time comes along, with its all-pervading unfor- gettable sweetnesses,—and then there are fine times afoot, forts and battles and banquets in the hay, perhaps a jaunt on top of the load. He is allowed to assist as onldoker at cow- milking and butter-churning, and is actually acquainted with the taste of unchemicalised milk. He is an enthusiastic cricketer, sui generis, but plays tip-and-run as a concession to the weaker sex. Natural history, especially as manifested in snakes, bats, and dormice, he pursues with avidity, and pre- serves a sort of armed neutrality with the keeper, resultant in considerable acquaintance with defunct weasels and polecats.
With later summer comes the harvesting, always an en- trancing process for the looker-on, when one plays hide-and- seek of an evening among the shocks or round the rising ricks. Nuts ripen for the gathering in garden and wood; there are blackberry expeditions, wherein you boil a kettle
gipsy-wise, and eat your cake on logs. Things always taste quite differently out of doors ; even thick bread-and-butter
takes on a sybaritic flavour. The boy threads strings of rose- berries and chestnuts for the younger members of his family, and bulges his pockets with irrelevant acorns. Probably be drags home dead wood and broken boughs, with many scratches and difficulties, for the mere satisfaction of annoying the wood-reeve. Then he shakes down apples into the orchard grass, and runs riot in pears, as be has previously done amid all the fruits of summer, copious, luxurious, unprohibited. With the dawn of the hunting season he is awake early, tramping jolly miles to the meet. Should his dwelling be near the sea, his happiness is proportionately enhanced, his activity, mental and bodily, called into swifter play. But in any case he is skilled of his hands, and can fashion him a whistle, a popgun, and such-like in place of those toyshop wares which exist, seldom seen and remotely, in the country town. Inci- dentally, but inevitably, as time goes on, he picks up the use of a gun, an oar, a horse; his holidays are long sequences of dangerous delights, from which his emergence unscathed can only be attributed to special interposition of Providence.
Such, roughly outlined, is the green and windy young life which has cradled our best and greatest. The pantomime, the Park, the "Zoo,"—are these effectual substitutes P It is remarkable how many of our heroes have been the sons of some rural parsonage, bred up in that intercommunion with Mother Earth which moulds and invigorates the mind for ever. In the quietude of woods and fields, from the melody of winds and rivers, splendid futures germinate. Horatio Nelson was a country child.
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