away in my satchel amidst grammars, dictionaries, and other necessary and disagreeable productions. Then Cook's Voyages! What an ocean of pleasure to me were his ocean wanderings! How did they divide, or rather completely abstract my faculties from subtraction, multiplication, or division (short or long)! I was sailing far away, in the good ship Endeavor, over the illimitable Pacific, what were vulgar fractions to me? I coasted through the Friendly Islands and took no heed of decimals; and, as far at least as I was concerned, arithmetical progression became stationary. I might be ostensibly in practice; but my practice was to go on indulging in stolen sweets" from morn till noon, from noon till dewey eve," until the awful hour of retribution arrived, and I was called upon to exhibit the sum total of my day's industry. This generally consisted of one or more questions "cabbaged" or stolen from some of my precursors in those difficulties. Sometimes they passed muster; but oh! the opaque darkness-the cheerless, hopeless, mental blindness in which I found myself enveloped whenever my worthy teacher requested me to "show how I came by the answer." How I came by it in one sense-how improperly and feloniously I came by it, I knew full well; but as for establishing any legitimate claim to the product, as for showing by

1

any given process how the answer could be correctly deduced from the premises, it was only a waste of his time and mine to request such a thing. Then poor left hand, came thy trial-" not for thine own demerits but for mine," fell blows from supple cane or leathern thong right heavily on thee! Many a blush and bruise La Perouse and Captain Cook cost thee-ill-used member-unfortunate extremity.

But I was incorrigible. Blows and admonitions were equally unavailable. I did not see or feel the 'moral justice of either one or the other; they were to me things of course-necessities, not judicious punishments; inevitable consequences, which must be endured and could not be avoided, and the next day I was again amongst my old friends the islanders, tattooing warriors, roasting dogs and marvelling how such "strange flesh" would eat when cooked, or performing any other equally curious or ingenious operations. When not reading I was dreaming. From the hubbub of the school I could transport myself in a twinkling to some fair Otaheitan isle--some speck of verdure that "lit the ocean with a smile," where summer, and gentle gales, and beauteous flowers, and odoriferous spices were perpetual; and there, where "feathery cocoas fring'd the bay," would I lay myself down and watch the breaking of the waves upon the sparkling shore,

until the tumbling of a slate or book, or the harsh growl of the master, startled me from my day-dream and brought me to a sense of things more immediate and material. But I possessed in a high degree the happy faculty of abstraction-a faculty that can transplant you in an instant from the dullest scenes and company to the brightest and gayest-and in a few moments I was again "all abroad"-listening to the roar of Niagara-scrambling over the blue mountains of Jamaica--lolling in the orange groves of the Indies,-until, after years of wandering I would fancy myself returning to anxious friends and old companions.

"When the flower was in the bud, and the leaf upon the tree,
With the lark to sing me hame to my ain countree." *1

What was the petty pain of a few blows (I never felt the disgrace) to such visions of delight? Nothing. And so I continued-a boy inured to stripes, and utterly destitute of all marks or orders of merit -the tail of my class-the superlative degree of comparison for idleness and inability. No "specimen" of my proficency in the art of chirography was ever exhibited before company in the parlor of my parents; nor

"When friends were met, and goblets crown'd,"

was I ever called upon, like other boys, to exem

plify the beauties of the British Poets by my juvenile powers of recitation.

I have traveled much in reality since then, and beheld with the corporeal eye many of the scenes and places that looked so surpassingly fair to my inward vision in former times. I have become "familiar with strange faces," and have made friends and acquaintance in far-off countries. But time and the world have done their usual work with me as with others. I am changed-vilely sophisticated; the smoke of cities is upon my soul, and innumerable trivial sensualities have imperceptibly clogged the elastic spring of the spirit within me. To enjoy the company of old mother nature now, I must have "all appliances and means to boot"-be easy and comfortable, neither hungry nor athirst, instead of seeking her in every form and mood as of yore. But this is the way, more or less, with us all. As we grow up, we acquire an unconscious preference for art above nature-we love the country less and the town more, and shady walks and "hedge rows green" are forsaken for wellpaved streets and public promenades. We muddle our brains with politics and political economy, and form attachments to newspapers and distilled and fermented liquors that it is often difficult to shake off. Oh the lamentable deterioration of human nature!

We are the antipodes (to our disadvantage,) of even the despised caterpillar tribe. We do not expand from the grub into the butterfly, but degenerate from the butterfly into the grub. When boys-or wingless butterflies, we disport in the free air and sunshine, clad in the hues of health, and as free from care or trouble as the lilies of the field. Every returning day brings animation and enjoyment—

"Flowers in the valley, splendor in the beam,
Health in the gale, and freshness in the stream,"

until the remorseless usages of the world apprentice us to doctors, tailors, lawyers, merchants, shipwrights, sugar-bakers, &c. to be initiated into their respective mysteries; we grow up to be sallow, bearded men-we herd together in cities--we monotonously slink day after day from the dull obscurity of our dwellings through dirty lanes and dusky alleys to our strange occupations, and then crawl back again we snarl at, and undermine each other-we play with unbecoming zeal “much ado about nothing" for a few years we die some day just when we did not want to do so- -the living clod is resolved into the lifeless one, and we become—a dream, a recollection, a dimly-remembered thing, of whom perchance, some singular custom or odd saying is recorded, at intervals, for a brief space of