I have been at school and college, I have read considerably in books, and have attended debating societies to satiety. Thus I have picked up a deal of what the world calls useful knowledge and worldly wisdom. But there is one branch of education to which I am more indebted than to any other whatever. I was born in the retired solitude of a mountain glen. I was myself alone amongst the mountains, with my mother and two old women, my relatives. I did not know, at the time, that I was any way peculiarly situated. I felt joyous and happy from morn to night; but the cause of all this happiness was no matter of inquiry. In fact, I never thought of causes at all. I took nature as she appeared, and put no impertinent questions to her. There I lay by a little stream, which, after dancing gaily down a steep and broken rock, became, all at once, a deep _bumbling_ pool. There I lay, amidst the daisies and buttercups of spring, on the green plot, listening to the song of a thousand throats, and marking the suspended trout, as it rose to the fly, or floated along in the watery sunshine. At intervals, I would stretch myself supine; and, with my eyes half-closed, convert the clouds which covered in our little valley into what shapes and forms my fancy pleased. The wild bee passed in his hum; but I saw him not. The grasshopper chirruped from the adjoining grass; but I marked not his form or his locality. The buzz of insect life was in the air, and on the earth. I was not alone, and I felt it; my companions were the happy, the lively, the rejoicing, the exulting; and I partook of all their sentiments. I was, in fact, a unity lost in the midst of countless beings--a single throb in the great framework of animated nature. And, then, there were the woods which embanked and enclosed me all around. The oak, with its spread stole and broad leaf; the glorious birch, rising in pillows of green fragrance, and overtopping all; the hazel, in its less aspiring nature, peeping from betwixt the trees; and the sweet hawthorn, bestudding the brae, arrayed in a wedding suit of purest white. The tall ash-tree was there, and the rowan-tree, and the sloe-thorn, and the rasp-berry, and the bramble. The whole valley was my own orchard; and I selected at pleasure, without check or restraint, the nut, the sloe, and the hind-berry. Upon the top of the tall ash, there I sat, with the mavis for my companion on one side, and the blackbird on the other. With all manner of birds I was familiar, from the pyat to the water-wagtail. The searching for nests was my spring recreation, from April till July--I could tell at once the inmate from the construction of its abode. The eggs of the linnet, goldfinch, yorling, laverock, robin, titling, thrush, and blackbird, were as familiar to me as the letters of the alphabet. And if I wandered but a mile and a-half up the glen, I was in the midst of barrenness and solitude. The shepherd loomed from the