Now, if he was a boy (for I want to be quite fair), he probably had seen the rabbit and given it chase; and it is more than likely that he had stopped long enough to chuck a stone at the squirrel; and if the mother bird had not finished with her foolish chatter, I fear he gave her some evil moments by hunting for her nest, with no good intentions. But if, fortunately for them, he had met none of these creatures, he probably looked at me in surprise, and answered by look, if not by words, “No, I thought it a long, stupid walk. I did not see a thing.” And if it was a girl, I fear the answer, silent or spoken, was much the same. Now, I say that boy or girl must have been partly blind to have missed seeing those wonderful flowers, and butterflies, and bees, and birds, and many other interesting things which I have not time here to tell about. Certainly they were not using their eyes properly; and the longer they go about in such a way, more worthy of a bat than of a well-made child, the more useless and bat-like will their eyes become. It is really more natural for a child to use his eyes constantly than it is for an older person. The grown-up man or woman is likely to have so many things to think about, that eyes and brain do not always work together, and so the surroundings are not noticed. For every boy knows that if his head is full of the ball game he is going to play, he runs along without eyes or thoughts for other things. And every girl knows that if she is on her way to some friend to whom she has a secret to tell, she is in such haste to reach her journey’s end, and is so busy thinking what her friend will have to say about it all, that of course there is no time to pay attention to anything else. Her eyes may be in good working order, yet they are not of much use unless her brain is ready to help them; and that little brain just now is too busy with its secret. No, by the people who are half blind I mean only those who much of the time use neither eyes nor brain, who can neither tell you what they have seen nor what they have been thinking about. Sometimes it seems as if such people were not only half blind, it seems as if they were only half alive. A HOLIDAY LESSON