The great destroyers of life are not labor and exertion, either physical or intellectual, but care, misery, crime, and dissipation. My wife derived from her parentage similar advantages, and all the habits of our lives, both before and since our marriage, have been of a similar character. My boyhood and youth were, for the most part, spent in the country; and all country objects, sports, and labors, horse-racing and hunting excepted, have had a never-failing charm for me. As a boy, I ranged the country far and wide in curious quest and study of all the wild creatures of the woods and fields, in great delight in birds and their nests, climbing the loftiest trees, rocks and buildings in pursuit of them. In fact, the life described in the "Boy's Country Book," was my own life. No hours were too early for me, and in the bright, sunny fields in the early mornings, amid dews and odour of flowers, I breathed that pure air which gave a life-long tone to my lungs that I still reap the benefit of. All those daily habits of climbing, running, and working developed my frame to perfection, and gave a vigor to nerve and muscle that have stood well the wear and tear of existence. My brain was not dwarfed by excessive study in early boyhood, as is too much the case with children of to-day. Nature says, as plainly as she can speak, that the infancy of all creatures is sacred to play, to physical action, and the joyousness of mind that give life to every organ of the system. Lambs, kittens, kids, foals, even young pigs and donkeys, all teach the great lesson of Nature, that to have a body healthy and strong, the prompt and efficient vehicle of the mind, we must not infringe on her ordinations by our study and cramping sedentariness in life's tender years. We must not throw away or misappropriate her forces destined to the corporeal architecture of man, by tasks that belong properly to an after-time. There is no mistake so fatal to the proper development of man and woman, as to pile on the immature brain, and on the yet unfinished fabric of the human body, a weight of premature and, therefore, unnatural study. In most of those cases where Nature has intended to produce a first-class intellect, she has guarded her embryo genius by a stubborn slowness of development. Moderate study and plenty of play and exercise in early youth are the true requisites for a noble growth of intellectual powers in man, and for its continuance to old age.