School life in town, notwithstanding its more sophisticated surroundings, has also its memories; for in what circumstances will not the boyish mind create a charmed world of its own! Apart from the actual events of class-room and play-ground, the streets and the shop windows, and the things in them to be desired, all furnish absorbing interests; and a half-amused envy in later years attends the memory of the fearful joy with which, after much contriving of ways and means, and much final screwing-up of courage to face the shopman, the long-coveted percussion pistol, or the wonderful and still more expensive model locomotive, was acquired and smuggled home. But school life in the city has a certain precocity which detracts from the poetry of its remembrance--an aroma is lacking which forms the subtlest charm of the associations of rustic childhood. What has the city-bred man to compare to the memory of that hot afternoon in July, when, escaped from the irksome thrall of desk and rod, in the clear river pool at the bottom of some deep-secluded dingle, the urchins of the rural pedagoguy learned to swim? Such a scene remains in a man’s mind, a possession and a “joy for ever.” Far off in some city den, gas-lit and fog-begrimed, his eyes may grow dim, poring over ledgers that are not his own, and his heart may grow heavy and sick with hope deferred; but at a word, a suggestion, it will all come back; he will be standing again on that grassy margin, the joyous voices of his comrades will be ringing in his ears, while the sunshine once more beats warmly on his head, and at his feet sparkle over their sandy bottom the pellucid waters of the woodland pool. The black art of letters is probably the least detail of the learning acquired by school-children in the country, and it must be confessed that the thirst for book-lore is not exactly their most conspicuous foible. Happy, nevertheless, in “schools and schoolmasters” of Nature’s own appointing, they grow up like the lilies, children of the earth and sun, and none the less fit for life, perhaps, that their learning has been got at first-hand from the facts and realities of actual existence. Who has not envied the bright-eyed boys and red-lipped little lasses, healthy with the breath of the woods and of the fresh-delved earth, whom one meets, satchel on back, on sequestered country roads? The dead tongues may be dead, indeed, to them, and mathematics an unnamed mystery; but, with eyes and ears open, they have learned all the lore of the fields and the hedges--have drunk deep at those nature-fountains whence all the literatures and poetries of the world have sprung. [Illustration]