Altogether you grow into a liking of the country: your boyish spirit loves its fresh, bracing air, and the sparkles of dew that at sunrise cover the hills with diamonds; and the wild river, with its black-topped, loitering pools; and the shaggy mists that lie in the nights of early autumn like unravelled clouds, lost upon the meadow. You love the hills, climbing green and grand to the skies, or stretching away in distance their soft, blue, smoky caps, like the sweet, half-faded memories of the years behind you. You love those oaks, tossing up their broad arms into clear heaven with a spirit and a strength that kindles your dawning pride and purposes, and that makes you yearn, as your forehead mantles with fresh blood, for a kindred spirit and a kindred strength. Above all you love--though you do not know it now--the BREADTH of a country life. In the fields of God's planting there is ROOM. No walls of brick and mortar cramp one; no factitious distinctions mould your habit. The involuntary reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural. The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent. The boy grows into manliness, instead of growing to be like men. He claims--with tears almost of brotherhood--his kinship with Nature; and he feels in the mountains his heirship to the Father of Nature! This delirium of feeling may not find expression upon the lip of the boy; but yet it underlies his thought, and will without his consciousness give the spring to his musing dreams. ----So it is, that, as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the old Squire's door, you muse upon the time when some rich-lying land, with huge granaries, and cosy old mansion sleeping under the trees, shall be yours,--when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come laughing down your pasture-lands,--when the clouds shall shed their spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths. You will then be a Squire, with your cane, your lean-limbed hound, your stocking-leg of specie, and your snuffbox. You will be the happy and respected husband of some tidy old lady in black, and spectacles,--a little phthisicky, like Frank's grandmother,--and an accomplished cook of stewed pears and Johnny-cakes! It seems a very lofty ambition at this stage of growth to reach such eminence, as to convert your drawer in the wainscot, that has a secret spring, into a bank for the country people; and the power to send a man to jail seems one of those stretches of human prerogative to which few of your fellow-mortals can ever hope to attain. ----Well, it may all be. And who knows but the Dreams of Age, when they are reached, will be lighted by the same spirit and freedom of nature that is around you now? Who knows, but that after tracking you through the spring and the summer of Youth, we shall find frosted Age settling upon you heavily and solemnly in the very fields where you wanton to-day?