Page:Handbook for Boys.djvu/17

 A MESSAGE FROM THE CHIEF SCOUT

To : There was once a boy who lived in a region of rough farms. He was wild with the love of the green outdoors—the trees, the tree-top singers, the wood-herbs and the live things that left their nightly tracks in the mud by his spring well. He wished so much to know them and learn about them, he would have given almost any price in his gift to know the name of this or that wonderful bird, or brilliant flower; he used to tremble with excitement and intensity of interest when some new bird was seen, or when some strange song came from the trees to thrill him with its power or vex him with its mystery, and he had a sad sense of lost opportunity when it flew away leaving him dark as ever. But he was alone and helpless, he had neither book nor friend to guide him, and he grew up with a kind of knowledge hunger in his heart that gnawed without ceasing. But this also it did: It inspired him with the hope that some day he might be the means of saving others from this sort of torment—he would aim to furnish to them what had been denied to himself.

There were other things in the green and living world that had a binding charm for him. He wanted to learn to camp out, to live again the life of his hunter grandfather who knew all the tricks of winning comfort from the relentless wilderness—the foster-mother so rude to those who fear her, so kind to the stout of heart.

And he had yet another hankering—he loved the touch of romance. When he first found Fenimore Cooper's books, he drank them in as one parched might drink at a spring. He reveled in the tales of courage and heroic deeds, he gloated over records of their trailing and scouting by red man and white; he gloried in their woodcraft, and lived it all in imagination, secretly blaming the writer, a little, for praising without describing it so it could be followed. "Some day," he said, "I shall put it all down for other boys to learn."

As years went by he found that there were books about most of the things he wished to know, the stars, the birds, the x