And why should he not? All beasts of the prairie and insects of the air are known to him as intimately as were the rising and setting stars to the old seafaring, star-led Greeks. During his summer the whip-poor-will has whistled in the shadow of the distant timber, and the hoot-owl has ghosted his sleep. He has wakened to the carol of the brown thrush and the yearning call of the mourning dove, as the dawn reached rosy fingers up the eastern sky. He has risen to look upon endless rows of corn earing its milky kernels, and upon fields golden with nodding wheat-heads. And from the impenetrable centre of the tillage, when the brown stubble has stood like needles to his bare feet, he has heard the whiz of the cicada quivering in the heated air. The steam-thresher has then come panting and rumbling over the highway, and in the affairs of men the boy has made his first essay. He cuts the wires that bind the sheaves, or feeds the hopper, or catches the wheat, or forks away the yellow straw, or ties the golden kernels in sacks, or brings water to the choked and dusty men. He runs here and there for all industries. Perhaps it is because of his association with such fundamentals of life that this boy has great grasp upon the physical world. In his very appearance one sees a life untaught in the schools of men. In looking at him there is nothing of which you are so often reminded as of a young cottonwood-tree. The tree and the boy somehow seem to have a kinship in structure, and to have been built by the same feeling upward of matter. And this perhaps he is--a broad-limbed, white-skinned, animalized, great-souled poplar, which in ages long past dreamed of red blood and a beating heart and power of moving over that fair earth--after the way that Heine’s fir-tree dreamed of the palm--and finally through this yearning became the honest boysoul and body which leaps from pure luxuriance of vigor, and runs and rides and breathes the vital air of Hesperus to-day. But even with the strong-limbed physique which open-air life upbuilds, the Hesperus students have their full quota of nervousness. Elements in their lives induce it. First there is the almost infinite possibility of accomplishment for the ambitious and energetic--so little is done, so much needs to be. Again, temperature changes of their climate are most sudden and extreme. A third incentive to nervous excitation is the stimulant of their wonderful atmosphere, which is so exhilarating that dwellers upon the Hesperus plateau suffer somnolence under the air-pressure and equilibrium of the seaboard.