collar, but entering for and winning the prize--dancing like a devil in barns at kirns--seeing his blooming partner home over the blooming heather, most perilous adventure of all in which virgin-puberty can be involved--fighting with a rival in corduroy breeches, and poll shorn beneath a caup, till his eyes just twinkle through the swollen blue--and, to conclude "this strange eventful history," once brought home at one o'clock in the morning, God knows whence or by whom, and found by the shrieking servant, sent out to listen for him in the moonlight, dead-drunk on the gravel at the gate! Nay, start not, parental reader--nor, in the terror of anticipation, send, without loss of a single day, for your son at a distant academy, mayhap pursuing even such another career. Trust thou to the genial, gracious, and benign _vis medicatrix naturæ_. What though a few clouds bedim and deform "the innocent brightness of the new-born day?" Lo! how splendid the meridian ether! What though the frost seem to blight the beauty of the budding and blowing rose? Look how she revives beneath dew, rain, and sunshine, till your eyes can even scarce endure the lustre! What though the waters of the sullen fen seem to pollute the snow of the swan? They fall off from her expanded wings, and, pure as a spirit, she soars away, and descends into her own silver lake, stainless as the water-lilies floating round her breast. And shall the immortal soul suffer lasting contamination from the transient chances of its nascent state--in this, less favoured than material and immaterial things that perish? No--it is undergoing endless transmigrations,--every hour a being different, yet the same--dark stains blotted out--rueful inscriptions effaced--many an erasure of impressions once thought permanent, but soon altogether forgotten--and vindicating, in the midst of the earthly corruption in which it is immersed, its own celestial origin, character, and end, often flickering, or seemingly blown out, like a taper in the wind, but all at once self-reillumined, and shining in inextinguishable and self-fed radiance--like a star in heaven. Therefore, bad as boys too often are--and a disgrace to the mother who bore them--the cradle in which they were rocked--the nurse by whom they were suckled--the schoolmaster by whom they were flogged--and the hangman by whom it was prophesied they were to be executed--wait patiently for a few years, and you will see them all transfigured--one into a preacher of such winning eloquence, that he almost persuades all men to be Christians--another into a parliamentary orator, who commands the applause of listening senates, and "Reads his history in a nation's eyes"