It would be pleasant
to me to recall many another of my old haunts, spots which, perhaps,
were never called beautiful before now, and may not be again for many a
day. For they all lie in a very tame and prosaic country, nearly level,
the utmost elevation getting hardly a couple of hundred feet above
tidewater mark; a country with less natural beauty than belongs to most
New England towns,--bare, bleak, rocky, with stunted vegetation and
ungenial soil. Yet within its limits there are brooks and marshes and
copses and woodlands,--rocks over which the wild columbine hangs its
fuchsia-like pendants, and dells where nestle the earliest and sweetest
of the wood-flowerets.
And now to come back to the miserable sinner. As schoolboy, as
bank-clerk, as teacher, as worker in many ways, he has unemployed
leisure in the hours of daylight,--not so many as he should have,
perhaps, but still many hours in the course of the month. Shall he go to
the livery-stable, the bowling-alley, or the billiard-saloon? Not being
a saint, of course he can plead no high-toned sense of need of physical
culture, to warrant these indulgences. He goes because he likes it, gets
enjoyment, exercise, rest for a mind tasked to the full with the day's
work.
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