smells now as it used to smell when it was so very much easier to pluck it, quite on our own level? Do strawberries taste as they did, and is there the same drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the red clover? Are modern kittens and puppies half so soft and so funny as they were in former days when we were young? No one will dare affirm any of these things who has reached years of discretion. Is it not then a most short-sighted policy—giving away of a bird in hand for a bird in the bush—to sacrifice the joyous hours of young existence for the value of advantages (if advantages indeed they be) to be reaped in later and duller years? Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have forgotten your own feelings. Let it be Coleridge’s “Little singing, dancing elf, Singing, dancing by itself.” Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into yours, and hear the laugh which only means the best of all possible jokes, “I _am_ so happy!” Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate algebraically what amount of classics and mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of young existence, wherein “Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give.” The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for the virtuous dead, and called it “Innis-na-n’Oge,” the “Island of the Young.” We all live there the first dozen years of mortality; and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear it may be long before we arrive at a better place. But hitherto we have taken for granted that the little prisoners of the school-room are all sure to live and come into their fortunes of erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is far from being the true state of the case. The poor little child, whose happiness—innocent, certain, and immediate happiness—is bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and contingent benefit of his later years, may very probably never see those years at all; nay, in a fixed average number of cases, it is absolutely certain that he will not grow into a man. Can anything be much more sad than such an abortive sacrifice? Who does not remember Walter Scott’s “Pet Marjory,” with her infantine delight in her visits to the country, and the calves and the geese, and the “bubbly-jocks”; and how she wrote down in her private journal that she was learning the multiplication table, and that seven times seven was a “divlish thing,” and quite impossible to acquire; and how, when somehow at last even the still more dreadful “eight times eight” had been lodged in her poor little brains, there came a day when she cried suddenly to her mother, “Oh, my head! my head!” and then in a few brief hours there was an end of lessons and their advantages for Marjory forever?