“Now that I think of it, I imagine that I was learning application, industry and self-control--big assets in business. The city-bred boy has never had that schooling. He has not been trained to hold himself to hard and continued effort. It is not his fault, and I do not know that his parents are to be blamed. I have two boys of my own born in the city, and one of the questions which perplexes me most is how to provide them with regular tasks that shall develop their sense of responsibility and cultivate habits of industry and application. Although I could afford to have a man to take care of the lawn and attend to the furnace, I have the boys do this work for their own sakes. It is good as far as it goes, but I am afraid it does not go far enough. They have too much time to spend in doing nothing, and habits of idleness formed in boyhood are likely to stick when one comes to manhood. I do not believe in manufacturing tasks or setting them at work which is not real, for boys are keen observers and you cannot fool them into believing that they are doing something worth while when compelled to take wood from one corner of the cellar and pile it in another corner, and then shift it back again. The man who devises some way of supplying real tasks for the boys of the well-to-do city families will be a public benefactor. “Now, that you have started the discussion of this subject, how about the physical health and strength that I brought from my country life to the work which I am doing? Of course, we have our sleeping porches and playgrounds and medical inspection in the public schools, and are doing what we can to build sound bodies for our city children, but I suspect that the out-door life of the country boy and his regular exercise and plain food furnish a far and away better physical preparation for the strenuous work of business life than anything we are able to devise for our children in the city. “You never saw my old home, did you? Well, the house stood at the foot of a hill and close by a little stream. In the summer time the wild strawberries in the meadow above the orchard were so thick that I remember picking a bushel there one day. For raspberries and blackberries we usually went some three or four miles to Babcock Hollow, but once there you could fill a ten-quart pail in no time at all, and they were the sweetest, most luscious berries you ever tasted. Then, in the fall, came apple picking and potato digging and corn cutting and nut gathering. There were dozens of butternut trees in the pasture-lot through which the creek ran, and on Button Hill you could get all the chestnuts you wished. Did you ever gather beechnuts? They are so little that picking them up by hand is slow work. We used to take three or four sheets, spread them under a beech tree, after the first frost had opened the burrs, and then one of the boys would climb the tree and pound the limbs, sending the nuts down upon the sheets in showers.