sent to bed without his supper. But even then he made opportunities for climbing feats. In company with his little brother David, John played games of “scootchers” (dares) in which the boys crept out of their dormer-windows and found congenial mountaineering exercise on the slate roof, sometimes hanging from the eaves by one hand, or even—for an instant—by a single finger.

It was only on Saturdays and during vacations, however, that these lads could taste the delights of roving. Johnnie Muir’s school-days began when he was not quite three years old. Can you picture the sturdy infant trudging along, with the sea-wind blowing out behind him like a flag the little green bag that his mother had hung around his neck to hold his first book? This infant had already learned his letters, however, from the shop signs, and it was not long before he passed the first mile-stone and spelled his way into the second book. When eight years old, John entered the grammar-school. Here he studied Latin and French, besides English, history, geography, and arithmetic. In regard to the methods employed, this doughty Scotchman used to say, with a twinkle: “We were simply driven pointblank against our books like a soldier against the enemy, and sternly ordered: ‘Up and at ’em! Commit your lessons to memory!’ If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped, for the grand, simple, Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”

From the school playground the boys loved to watch the ships at sea and guess where they were bound. In stormy weather, that brought the salt spume from the waves over the wall, they often saw the brave vessels tossed against the rocky shore. Many of John’s school-books showed ships at full sail on the margins, particularly the one that stirred his imagination most—the reader which told about the forests of America, with their wonderful birds and sugarmaple trees.

One evening, when John and David were loyally trying to forget dreams of voyages to magic lands where brave adventure awaited one at every turn, and master their lessons for the next day, their father came into the room with wonderful news.

“Bairns,” he said, “you need na learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re gaen to America the morn!”

How the words sang in their hearts! “America the morn!” Instead of grammar, a land where sugar-trees grew in ground full of gold; with forests where myriads of eagles, hawks, and pigeons circled about millions of birds’ nests; where deer hid in every thicket; and where there was never a gamekeeper to deny a lad the freedom of the woods!

Only their grandfather looked troubled, and said in a voice that trembled more than usual: “Ah, puir laddies! Ye’ll find something else ower the sea forby gold and birds’ nests and freedom frae lessons. Ye’ll find plenty of hard, hard work.”

But nothing could cast a shadow on their joy. “I’m gaen to Amaraka the morn!” they shouted to their envying, doubting schoolmates.

It took six weeks and a half for the old-fashioned sailing-vessel to cross the Atlantic. The father had taken three of the children, John, David, and Sarah, to help him make a home in the wilderness for the rest of the family. The spot selected was near Kingston, Wisconsin, then settled only by a few scattered, hardy pioneers. Here, with the help of their nearest neighbors, they built in a day a cabin of rough, bur-oak logs.

This hut was in the midst of the woods which fringed a flowery meadow and a lake where pond-lilies grew. The boys had not been at home an hour before they discovered a bluejay’s nest with three green eggs, and a woodpecker’s hole, and began to make acquaintance with the darting, gliding creatures of springs and lake.

“Here,” said John Muir, “without knowing it, we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.”

Soon farm life began in earnest. Fields were cleared and plowed; a frame house was built on the hill; and the mother with the younger children came to join these pioneers. It would seem that the long days of unceasing toil—planting, hoeing, harvesting, splitting rails, and digging wells—that retarded the growth of the active lad would have completely quenched the flickerings of his wild, eager spirit. But he managed to absorb, in the most astonishing way, the lore of woods and fields and streams, until the ways of birds, insects, fishes, and wild plant-neighbors were as an open book to him.

It was not long before his alert mind began to hunger for a real knowledge of the books which in his childish days he had studied without understanding. He read not only the small collection of religious books that his father had brought with him from Scotland, but also every stray volume that he could borrow from a neighbor.

When John was fifteen, he discovered that the poetry in the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in Milton could give something of the same keen joy that a Sunday evening on a hilltop made him feel, when sunset and rising moon and the hushed voices of twilight were all mingled in one thrilling delight. All beauty was one, he found.

The noble lines echoed in his memory as he cradled the wheat and raked the hay. The precious opportunities for reading were stolen five minutes at a time when he lingered in the kitchen with book and candle after the others had gone to bed. Night after night his father would call with exasperated emphasis: “John, do you expect me to call you every night? You must go to bed when the rest do.”

One night as he descended on the boy with more than usual sternness his anger was somewhat disarmed when he noticed that the book in question was a Church history. “If you will read,” he added, “get up in the morning. You may get up as early as you like.”

That night John went to bed wondering how he was going to wake himself in order to profit by this precious permission. Though his was the sound sleep of a healthy boy who had been splitting rails in the snowy woods, he sprang out of bed as if roused by a mysterious reveille long before daylight, and, holding his candle to the kitchen clock, saw that it was only one o’clock.

“Five hours to myself!” he cried exultingly. “It is like finding a day—a day for my very own!”

Realizing that his enthusiasm could not suffice to keep him warm in the zero weather, and that his father would certainly object to his making a fire, he went down cellar, and, by the light of a tallow dip, began work on the model of a self-setting sawmill that he had invented.

“I don’t think that I was any the worse for my short ration of sleep and the extra work in the cold and the uncertain light,” he said; “I was far more than happy. Like Tam o’ Shanter I was glorious—‘O’er all the ills of life victorious.”

When his sawmill was tested in a stream that he had dammed up in the meadow, he set himself to construct a clock that might have an attachment connected with his bed to get him up at a certain hour in the morning. He knew nothing of the mechanism of timepieces beyond the laws of the pendulum, but he succeeded in making a clock of wood, whittling the small pieces in the moments of respite from farm-work. At length the “early-rising machine” was complete and put in operation to his satisfaction. There was now no chance that the weary flesh would betray him into passing a precious half-hour of his time of freedom in sleep.

“John,” said his