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the country will come out in the successful banker, statesman, lawyer, merchant, or business man.

Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred. The country boy is constantly thrown upon his own. resources; he is forced to think for himself, and this calls out his ingenuity and makes him self-reliant and strong. It has been found that the use of tools in our manual training schools develops the brain, strengthens the deficient faculties and brings out latent powers. The farm-reared boy is in the best manual training school in the world and is constantly forced to plan things, make things; he is always using tools. This is one of the reasons why he usually develops better allround judgment and a more level head than the city boy.

It is human nature to exaggerate the value of things beyond our reach. People save money for years in order to go to Europe to visit the great art centers and see the famous masterpieces, when they have really never seen the marvelous pictures painted by the Divine Artist and spread in the landscape, in the sunset, in the glory of flowers and plant life, right at their very doors.

What a perpetual inspiration, what marvels of beauty, what miracles of coloring are spread everywhere in nature, confronting us on every hand! We see them almost every day of our lives and they become so common that they make no impression upon Think of the difference between what a Ruskin sees in a landscape and the impression conveyed to his brain, and what is seen by the ordinary mind, the ordinary person who has little or no imagination and whose esthetic faculties have scarcely been developed!

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We are immersed in a wilderness of mysteries and marvelous beauties. Miracles innumerable in grass and flower and fruit are performed right before our eyes. How marvelous is Nature's growing of fruit,

for example! How she packs the concentrated sunshine and delicious juices into the cans that she makes as she goes along, cans exactly the right size, without a particle of waste, leakage or evaporation, with no noise of factories, no hammering of tins! The miracles are wrought in a silent laboratory; not a sound is heard, and yet what marvels of skill, deliciousness and beauty!

What interrogation points, what wonderful mysteries, what wit-sharpeners are ever before the farmer boy, whichever way he turns! Where does all this tremendous increase of corn, wheat, fruit and vegetables come from? There seems to be no loss to the soil, and yet, what a marvelous growth in everything! Life, life, more life on every hand! Wherever he goes he treads on chemical forces which produce greater marvels than are described in the Arabian Nights. The trees, the brooks, the mountains, the hills, the valleys, the sunsets, the growing animals on the farm, are all mysteries that set him thinking and to wondering at the creative processes which are working on every hand.

Then again, the delicious freedom of it all, as contrasted with the cramped, artificial life in the city! Everything in the country tends to set the boy thinking, to call out his dormant powers and develop his latent forces. And what health there is in it all! How hearty and natural he is in comparison with the city. boy, who is tempted to turn night into day, to live an artificial, purposeless life.

The very temptation in the city to turn night into day is of itself health-undermining, stamina-dissipating and character-weakening.

While the city youth is wasting his precious energy capital in late hours, pleasure seeking, and often dissipation, the country youth is storing up power and vitality; he is being recharged with physical force by

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HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN

Copyright, 1000, by McClure, Phillips & Co.

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