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cock of Birch's. They were obliged to drag off the boy; and Frank, with admiration and regard for him, prophesied the great things he would do. Legends of combats are preserved fondly in schools; they have stories of such at Rodwell Regis, performed in the old Doctor's time, forty years ago.

"Champion's affair with the young Tutbury Pet, who was down here in training-with Black the bargeman-with the three head boys of Dr. Wapshot's academy, whom he caught maltreating an outlying day-boy of ours,-are known to all the Rodwell Regis men. He was always victorious. He is modest and kind, like all great men. He has a good, brave, honest understanding. He cannot make verses like young Pinder, or read Greek like Wells the Prefect, who is a perfect young abyss of learning, and knows enough to furnish any six first-class men; but he does his work in a sound downright way, and he is made to be the bravest of soldiers, the best of country parsons, an honest English gentleman wherever he may go."

To those who hold to the natural wickedness of boys as an article of belief, we may here point out that bad boys are almost invariably friendless. They may have their tools, or their slaves, but they have no friends. Honest boyhood instinctively avoids them. It is otherwise in the world, where men are found to consort with "sneaks" and "bullies" and "braggarts," with mean and contemptible creatures, who, in every well-conducted school, would be "coldshouldered" almost unanimously. Boys are not so fettered by conventionalities as men; they call a spade by its proper name; and they are not afraid to show their repugnance to dishonourable conduct. To form and maintain a lasting friendship, you must be able to present a tolerably clean record, must possess a character for straightforwardness and truthfulness. I think that very few boys will condescend to clasp hands with any whose names are inscribed on that mysterious, unwritten, but well-known "Black List," which Public Opinion draws up in every place where boys do congregate.

Boys' delight in a country life-Their winter amusements- Skating Sleighing Curling Snowballing-The great "snow-bicker of Pidmount "A digression upon fighting-The coming of spring-Spring flowers-A song of spring-Going a-violeting-The trees put on their foliage-Angling-The bluebell-The lily of the valley-The cowslip -A song of May-May blossoms-June-Haymaking-Roses-Harvesting-Harvest home-Nutting-Miss Mitford's description-Blackberrying-Advance of autumn-Hips and haws-Mushrooms-Ferns and fern-gathering-Boys at the seaside-Their various pastimes-The fishing-boats-The Mayor of Plymouth and the lobster-Down by the sea- -Boys at the seashore-Coming of winter-Intellectual pastime for winter evenings-A new version of an old play-A story from Ben Jonson-Christmas come again-A Christmas scene-Private theatricals Getting up a drawing-room performance "The Sleeping Beauty "-An apology for the home drama-Christmas as it was-Scott quoted-Christmas as it is-The boys at ChristmasAn address to Christmas-Concluding suggestions-Boyhood's memories,

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ENERALISATIONS, like definitions, are dangerous; but I will venture on one generalisation, to which I think no exception can be taken, and that is :-Boys are nowhere so happy as in the country.

A healthy, high-spirited boy, with abundant energy and a keen faculty of enjoyment, with sharp eyes, ready hands, and nimble feet, always seems to me as much out of place in a crowded, smoky, airless city as a lion in a cage, or Dr. Blimber in a toffy-shop. He is not fully himself except when his foot is on his native heather: when he is paddling in the clear, cold burnie, angling in the woodland pool, hunting for blackberries in green lanes, scaling old mossy walls in quest of the nest with the young owlets in it, or groping for crabs among the weedy rocks. There, indeed, he stands revealed in all his fulness of daring and exuberance of mirth; goodhumoured, lively, heedless of danger, frank of speech, ready of resource. Take a street Arab, born and bred amid the hum of men and in the shadow of dusky streets; place him on the sea-shore or in the heart of the woods, and observe how sudden and strange a transformation he undergoes. His preternatural shrewdness, his old-world look, his precocious mannishness, pass away as rapidly as the pallor of his complexion. Like Æson boiled in Medea's caldron, he becomes young again. The rind and crust of premature age falls off him, and he renews his free and joyous boyhood. And you will see that boys whose early years have been spent among the sights and sounds of the country, with the wholesome breeze playing in their hair, and their young lungs invigorated by the blithe rural atmosphere, are ever so much more boyish than their compeers of the town. They retain their juvenility longer. They don't develop into "young men at sixteen, and wear the gloom of a misanthropical experience of life at eighteen. They are not ashamed of being boys; they don't adopt all kinds of ingenious expedients to make their boyhood pass as young-man-hood. No, happy creatures! The fields and the lanes are theirs, and the green woods and the hawthorn hedges; the solemn hill-tops are theirs, and the shining streams and the broad meadows, and the cornfields with the ripeness of the harvest upon them; hazel-nuts are theirs, and jetty blackberries, and the produce of prolific orchards; the songs of the birds are theirs, and the

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hum of the grasshopper, and the murmur of honey-laden bees. O happy country boys! cling to your boyhood, cling to its pleasant pastimes, to its innocent enjoyments. Believe me, in all your later life you will never again partake of pleasures so manly and so pure.

The pleasures of the country boy begin with the beginning of the year. When the earth lies hidden beneath its shroud of snow, and the glittering frost begems the leafless branches; when the redwing and the fieldfare are sore straitened for want of food; when the robin grows familiar, and comes to the window or the open door for the dole dealt out by friendly hands; when the whiteness of the meadows is strangely spotted here and there by the shadows of rooks and starlings speeding abroad on their daily foraging expeditions; when the drifts lie deep in the narrow lanes, and are heaped high above the hedge-tops;-then he sets forth, on pastime bent, to seek the nearest pond, where, on the hard frozen surface, he and his mates skate to and fro with untiring vigour, while every echo resounds with their ringing laughter. Then, as evening draws near, he doffs his skates, slings them across his shoulder, and prepares for the homeward journey, amid a volley of snowballs discharged by skilful hands. Nothing loth, he accepts the challenge, and, until his arms ache and his frame is all aglow, keeps up an energetic cannonade. At last, the dusky twilight beginning to deepen into night, he and his comrades cease the mimic battle, and, shouting and singing, return to their respective homes, stopping, perhaps, on the way to chat for a minute or two with the village blacksmith, from whose forge a ruddy glare falls across the whitened road.

Nor is this all. The "cold" continuing, and the snow freezing hard, our boy seizes on an old box, which he fixes upon a couple of wooden runners, and in this impromptu sleigh or sledge down the slippery incline he rushes at an ever-increasing pace. Sleighing has grown more popular with English and Scottish boys of recent years, but it has never attained to such extensive favour here as it enjoys in the more Northern countries or in Western Europe.

In Holland, the peasants skate to market along the frozen canals, frequently accomplishing thirty miles in three hours, with a burden of seventy to eighty pounds on their heads. In Lapland and Sweden, as in Canada, the boys-ay! and adults also