Boys should practice their hands upon the knife. John Bull used to laugh at Brother Jonathan for whittling, and Mr. Punch always drew the Yankee with a blade in his fingers; but they found out long ago in Great Britain that whittling in this land led to something, a Boston notion, a wooden clock, a yacht America, a labor-saving machine, a cargo of wooden-ware, a shop full of knick-knacks, an age of inventions. Boys need not be kept back to the hand-craft of the knife. For in-doors there are the type case and printing press, the paint box, the tool box, the lathe; and for out doors, the trowel, the spade, the grafting knife. It matters not how many of the minor arts the youth acquires. The more the merrier. Let each one gain the most he can in all such ways; for arts like these bring no harm in their train; quite otherwise, they lure good fortune to their company. Play, as well as work, may bring out hand-craft. The gun, the bat, the rein, the rod, the oar, all manly sports, are good training for the hand. Walking insures fresh air, but it does not train the body or mind like games and sports which are played out of doors. A man of great fame as an explorer and as a student of nature (he who discovered, in the West, bones of horses with two, three, and four toes, and who found the remains of birds with teeth) once told me that his success was largely due to the sports of his youth. His boyish love of fishing gave him his manly skill in exploration. I speak as if hand-craft was to be learned by sport. So it may. It may also be learned by labor. Day by day for weeks I have been watching from my study window a stately inn rise from the cellar just across the road. A bricklayer has been there employed whose touch is like the stroke of an artist. He handled each brick as if it were porcelain, balanced it carefully in his hand, measured with his eye just the amount of mortar which it needed, and dropped the block into its bed, without staining its edge, without varying from the plumb line, by a stroke of hand-craft as true as the sculptor's. Toil gave him skill.