Hills and streams, woods and flowers, bees and birds and butterflies, the flora and fauna of this earth where we have our home for a little time, should, somehow, be brought into the life of the child. The boy who grows up into manhood without being privileged to know the world of nature by personal contact has been robbed. He may be intelligent in many things and a useful member of society, but he has missed out of life some of its deepest satisfactions and purest joys. Indeed, such an one is not symmetrically educated, and is quite likely to be put to shame as the years pass. A story is told of a young woman, able to order her breakfast in six different languages, who, spending some days in the home of a farmer, made most mortifying mistakes concerning the common things of country life. When, coming down to breakfast one morning she discovered a plate of honey on the table, she felt that the time had come for a display of her knowledge and for the discomfiture of those who had laughed at her mistakes, and exclaimed, "Ah! I see that you keep a bee."
Take the witness box! Yes, I am speaking to you, middle-aged man, city-dweller, slave to business, familiar with paved streets and great buildings, the honk of automobile horns and the love songs of vagrant cats.
"Forgotten it! Sometimes I can think of nothing else, and always something out of that boyhood is popping up even in the midst of my business undertakings."
"Do you regret that you were not born in the city?"
"Regret it? Say, you are fooling. I wouldn't trade the recollections of my boyhood on the farm for the best business block in this city."
"But it can't be worth anything to you in a business way. Life in the country doesn't train one to manufacture gas engines."
"Well, I've never stopped to consider what I owe in the matter of business success to my boyhood in the country, but now that you raise the question, I'm inclined to believe that it gave me pretty good training in some ways for the business in which I am engaged.
"When I came into this business at the age of twenty I was given a place in the shipping department at a salary of seven dollars per week. Now I am at the head of the firm, while many of the fellows who were with me in those days are still working on salary. You see I had the advantage of the city boys in being accustomed to work. On the farm I had my regular tasks. Why, when I was a little chap I wiped the dishes for mother, and when I grew older I had to keep the wood-box filled and go after the cows and pick up potatoes and--but you know what a lot of things there are to do on a farm where 'a boy can help.