"Yes?"
"So I took a little one and put it on the roost in between two big hens—a little one and a big one, a little one and a big one, to keep the little ones warm; and it took a lot of time."
"Will you have another cup of warm milk?" she asks, pouring him more from the pitcher, doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed to me, considering how she ran the cup over.
Shall I take them back to the city for the winter—away from their chickens, and cow and dog and pig and work-bench and haymow and fireside, and the open air and their wild neighbors and the wilder nights that I remember as a child?
"There it a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea--and music in its roar."
Once they have known all of this I can take them into town and not spoil the poet in them.
"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in the open air. Above all, you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. The great God has called me. Take comfort in that I die in peace with the world and myself and not afraid"—from the last letter of Captain Scott to his wife, as he lay watching the approach of death in the Antarctic cold. His own end was nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should never take a father's part, what should be his last word for him?
"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in the open air."
Those are solemn words, and they carry a message of deep significance. I have watched my own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I believe the words are true. So thoroughly do I believe in the physical and moral value of the outdoors for children, the open fields and woods, that before my children were all born I brought them here into the country. Here they shall grow as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the same fields with them; here they shall play as the young foxes and woodchucks play, and on the same bushy hillsides with them—summer and winter.
Games are natural and good. It is a stick of a boy who won't be "it." But there are better things than games, more lasting, more developing, more educating. Kittens and puppies and children play; but children should have, and may have, other and better things to do than puppies and kittens can do; for they are not going to grow up into dogs and cats.