when he is pretty well grown; to some neither ever comes.  And yet there was an artificial military courtesy (something like that existing in the feudal age, no doubt) which put the meeting of these two rival and mutually detested companies on a high plane of behavior.  It was beautiful to see the seriousness of this lofty and studied condescension on both sides.  For the time everything was under martial law.  The village company being the senior, its captain commanded the united battalion in the march, and this put John temporarily into the position of captain, with the right to march at the head and “holler;” a responsibility which realized all his hopes of glory.  I suppose there has yet been discovered by man no gratification like that of marching at the head of a column in uniform on parade, unless, perhaps, it is marching at their head when they are leaving a field of battle.  John experienced all the thrill of this conspicuous authority, and I daresay that nothing in his later life has so exalted him in his own esteem; certainly nothing has since happened that was so important as the events of that parade day seemed.  He satiated himself with all the delights of war.

XVIII

COUNTRY SCENES

It is impossible to say at what age a New England country-boy becomes conscious that his trousers-legs are too short, and is anxious about the part of his hair and the fit of his woman-made roundabout.  These harrowing thoughts come to him later than to the city lad.  At least, a generation ago he served a long apprenticeship with nature only for a master, absolutely unconscious of the artificialities of life.

But I do not think his early education was neglected.  And yet it is easy to underestimate the influences that, unconsciously to him, were expanding his mind and nursing in him heroic purposes.  There was the lovely but narrow valley, with its rapid mountain stream; there were the great hills which he climbed, only to see other hills stretching away to a broken and tempting horizon; there were the rocky pastures, and the wide sweeps of forest through which the winter tempests howled, upon which hung the haze of summer heat, over which the great shadows of summer clouds traveled; there were the clouds themselves, shouldering up above the peaks, hurrying across the narrow sky,—­the clouds out of which the wind came, and the lightning and the sudden dashes of rain; and there were days when the sky was ineffably blue and distant, a fathomless vault of heaven where the hen-hawk and the eagle poised on outstretched wings and watched for their prey.  Can you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few books and no contact with the great world?  Do you think any city lad could have written “Thanatopsis” at eighteen?