As sure as you were born."
Many such little rhymes did the children sing, as if each tried to outdo the other in the number of songs they knew. At length Ivo said, "Now you drive your duckies home; I'm coming soon too." He was a little ashamed of going home with Emmerence, though conscious of nothing but the fear that his silly comrades would tease him. After she had been gone for some time he followed with his calf.
It gave Ivo pain to see that, as soon as the calf was weaned, the heifer, its dam, seemed to care no more about it. He did not know that the beasts of the field cling to their young only so long as they actually depend on and are in bodily connection with them. It is only while young birds are unable to fly and get their own food, only while the young quadruped sucks its dam's milk, that any thing like childlike or parental love subsists. This connection once severed, the old ones forget their young. Man alone has a more than bodily relationship to his child, and in him alone, therefore, the love of offspring continues through life.
5.
LIFE IN THE FIELDS.
Ivo's life was rich in suggestions, not only at home, among men and beasts, but also with the silently-growing corn and in the rustling orchard. All the world, with its glories and its noiseless joys, entered the open portals of his youthful soul. If we could continue to grow as we do in childhood, our lot would be replete with all the blessings of Heaven; but a time comes when the sum of all things breaks upon us in a mass, and then the remnants of our lives are occupied in the dreary labor of dissecting, puzzling, and explaining.
During the summer holidays, in haying and harvest time, Ivo was almost constantly afield with Nat. There his real life seemed to begin; and, when he looked upward, the blue of his eyes was like a drop fallen from the sky which sprang its broad arch so serenely over the busy haunts of men; and it seemed as if this bit of heaven, straying upon earth,
"but long'd to flee
Back to its native mansion."
Something of this kind glimmered through Nat's thoughts one day when he took Ivo by the chin and kissed him fervently on the eyelids. The next moment he was ashamed of this tenderness, and teased Ivo and playfully struck him.