with my vision of our wonderful prairies, I thought it was a pity a man should try to live. I have read since then the life of a man who was raised in that land, and the days do not seem long enough for time to sing its praises. The wild sea, and rocks, and heather are more to him than the fee-simple of the State of Illinois would be; and, canny Scot as he is, you feel all the time he would not make the exchange if he had the chance; because these wild lands were his home, and stay away down in his heart, he can leave them no more than he can leave his own soul. And there was one boy in our hamlet, of my own age, who came up from his birth in the poor-house. I went there, when I was over, to see some of the old inmates; and, asking after this boy, they told me how he had risen in the world, had been there to see them, and had gone over the dismal old building with a most tender and moving interest. And so it is, I suppose, with us all. It is no matter how forbidding the land may be, or how hard the lot, or how unwilling we may be, after many years, to go back there and stay: there is no place like that first home. We seem to be tethered to it still, when we live on the other side of the world. Those are white days, when in our childhood we can rush away and see the world which lies beyond the line, where the hills touch the sky, and then come back to the old nest; but I doubt whether any days are ever so dark again as

those we have to live through when we leave home for good, and know that the old life is over. And white days when we can eat at another table, and wonder how it is our mother does not make things taste so good as those do they give us there; but when our mother has done with us, and the bread of strangers is the staff of our life, we wonder again whether anybody ever will make things taste so good as those she gave us in the old time. Indeed, I have known men well on in life hold stoutly to the idea that their wives fell far short of their mothers in this matter, and, if the dear old soul was still in the world, had to go home in order to get over their dream, and then, if they were men of grace, to come back perhaps, and say, "Well, wife, I do think, after all, that the bread which deserves to take the first prize is this in which you have hidden your own wedding-ring."

I notice this far-reaching love for the old home does not depend, as a rule, again, on the way in which those who raise us are bound by the Scripture, "Train up a child in the way he should go; because in that case the chances are, they will make the sad mistake of thinking a good the way than they do of the child.

deal more of

And then to

this mistake they bring another. They fix their minds on the other end, instead of the hither end of the way, and train up the child for what they think he ought to be at forty, rather than for what

he is anywhere between four and fourteen. So it falis out very often, that those children who have been subjected to the most thorough training all through their childhood turn out a shame to their kinsfolk, go directly in the face of all this training, and, when they once get away from home, think of it with the least affection. The truth is, in such a case, they have made havoc of the child, in order to make a man, and tried to force that to a speedy head which Nature has determined shall only round and ripen in the large leisure of the spring and summer of our life; and, then when they are through, those God gave them for all sweet and noble ends feel they have been cheated out of their childhood, so they do not love that which has never been truly revealed to them; and, having been cheated out of the kindly and wholesome joy of the years that come once and no more, they are like young horses that have been held in by a cruel bit: once let them get the bit between their teeth, or slip out of the bridle, and they will plunge on like mad things, careless of consequences in the measure of the strength and fire which is hidden all the time in their nature.

That grand Scotchman I mentioned just now was a minister, so was his father and grandfather, and all Presbyterians; but it is simply wonderful to notice how the ideal of such a minister's home has

1 Norman Macleod.

1

changed for the worse, as I think, if the children are to think of it in the next century as the dearest place on earth. The grandsire was the father of sixteen children, so there was enough to do in the way of tending and training in a poor highland parish. But on a winter's night the minister would get out his fiddle, bid the boys put away their books, and the girls their sewing, strike up a swinging Scotch reel, and set them dancing to his music; and then, when they were through, they had family prayer. Think for a moment of such a scene as that in the habitation of your Presbyterian ministers here in the North-West, or, for that matter, anywhere in America. Yet I doubt whether a nobler man ever lived in the highlands than that good old country parson. So it was in a fair measure in the home in which this lad himself was trained. There is a wide sky above it, and a warm atmosphere within, plenty of freedom between task and task, plenty of room for the tender roots of childhood to strike down into the interstices of the mass of hard reality, and to find nurture as the vines find it among the rocks that have been enriched with fine mould. "Only two things," e man said long after, my father and mother tried to instil into us, and these were truth and love. They had no cranks or twists or crotchets or isms.

66

When the time came for

my father to give us a good blowing-up, we got it; but he made no fuss about trifles or failures or in

firmities." And so it was, that, when this man came to be a leader among men, his heart went back to the old home among the wild hills and seas. A great sunny, catholic heart, touched to its fine perfection in that nest where, as he says again, "Christianity was taken for granted, and never forced on us with a scowl or a frown; where the good old Catholic priest would always come with his troubles, and be sure to find counsel and sympathy, and where he always staid as a most honored guest in his visitations to that side of his great rambling parish." The boys fitted up the attic for a sort of home theatre; and this one was the leader in the play, to which the family came in state. They tumbled round in the wild waters, and wandered away after wild things on the moors, and climbed the rocks at the risk of all their bones. But still the strong old home held them to its heart; and that grace touched them which is not at all this hectic fever with which small souls are badgered now under the guise of getting religion, but love and truth, and a heart open to heaven in the most natural, therefore the most beautiful way. So the boy grew to be a most noble man; and when he died, he gave commandment concerning his bones, and was buried close to the old nest, with the wild hills for sentinels about his grave.

When we say, then, there is no place like home, it is wise to see what we mean by such an axiom