“It is my positive desire that Emilie should learn a trade. An honest one, at least, you will perhaps say. What means that? Every calling useful to the public is an honest one, is it not? I don’t wish particularly that he should be a carver and gilder, neither do I particularly care that he should be an actor, or a musician. Still, let him adopt any one of those professions, or others resembling them, that he may fancy. I do not wish to fetter his will in anything, only I would rather he was a shoemaker than a poet, and would much prefer him to earn his livelihood by paving-stones than by porcelain.” I read over and over again, the paragraph which opened up this train of thought; and at last, I understood it. Let no one be astonished that my intelligence was so slow. Taken up as I was until I had reached at this time, my fourteenth year, with the usual jog-trot of rustic occupations, my mind had remained in a sort of twilight. I continued my reading. “The needle and the sword can never be wielded by the same hand. If I were a king, I would only permit the ell, the wand, and the shears, to women, and to maimed men, equally feeble with the weaker sex. I would forbid callings against health, but not those which are simply laborious, or even dangerous, for those demand at once both strength and courage. Everything considered, the trade which I should like a pupil of mine to adopt of himself would be that of a carpenter.” “Ah,” said I, “what a good fellow this Monsieur Rosseau is! How I do like him!” I tackled to my book again. “Touching a carpenter’s trade, it is a tidy calling: it is useful; you can follow it in the house; it requires both skill and industry; whilst the exercise of taste is not excluded from the articles it turns out.” So, then, I was precisely in the state recommended by the author of “Emile.” Not only that, but I did not even require to learn the trade he praised; I knew it already. I read on as follows:— “Of all states and conditions of life, the most independent is that of a mechanic. A mechanic is dependent upon his work only; he is just so much free as an agricultural laborer is a slave; for the latter can only prepare the field, and leave the product thereof to fate. A foe—a powerful neighbor—a law-suit, can deprive him of his field; in fact, that very field can be made to vex him in a thousand different ways. But, if fate disturbs a mechanic, he gathers his tools together, and, carrying his sturdy arms with him, away he goes.” At this point, I looked at my own arms, already muscular and well-developed, and I swung them in the air with pride. Evidently the man was right who wrote those lines.