Morning journal and courier., 1885-01-17
SWeet-Scented Fern.

Correspondence of the New York Journal of Com
 merce.]
 There can be no reasonable doubt that the sense which is most closely linked with our powers of memory is the sense of smell. We are greatly puzzled sometimes to know what has brought to mind the event of long ago, a person whom we have not thought of for years, scene that has been forgotten since childhood. Very often this sudden memory has been aroused by 8 passing odor, the never-lost perfume of flower, @ handker- chief, meadow. So subtle are the opera tions of the mind that we know little about them, and least of all about that stowaway place which we call memory. Neither you nor know @ hundred-thousandth part of what we really do know, of what we have learned, treasured, and now keep stored up; only it is like some things we have so care fully laid away that we can't-find them when we want them, or have ceased to know that possess them.
 There was once a boy. It was a great while ago. That is, it seemed to him long while to come, when he, boy, looked for ward to the old age he afterward reached But when he was old man it did not seem such a great while ago that he was boy, living in small house, half log, half clap board, on the edge of a clearing in New Hampshire. This boy lived there much alone. For though he had a father and a mother it goes without saying that small boy on new farm leads a lonesome life, when father and mother are st work all the waking hours When he was ten years old he was 8 hard working boy too He had never been to school, never even learned to read. There was not book, not so much as Testament in the house, and so far as he 1~ol l. I1 world, nor any God in it or over it. I won der if you know, what is the solemn fact, that there are families, American families, with one, two and many children, in New England States, of exactly this descrip- tion.
 Another family came into that part of the country, and another small house went up on the opposite bank of the lake For the houses stood on pond or lake, which was a half mile broad and two or three miles long and the old forest was all around it. except for two clearings. Now came into the boy life new light, and he began to know the world. For there was a daughter in the other family, besides two sons; and what can not a boy learn of the world from two other boys and one happy little girl? He learned more from her than from them For some how he learned from her to look into himself, and think about himself and what he was That is a long step toward knowledge of the world, when boy gets into the way of studying himself, thoughtfully. For almost all the joys, ambitions, and enioyments, al most all the sins, 1abors and sorrows of matured life are miniatured in the boy life The little pleasures of child are like in character to the great pleasures of the man. The triumph of successful attack on wood chucks hole is the far-away autotype of a great operation in stocks or the brilliant cap ture of large corporation.
 Many a summer evening whAn his work was done, he padded his dug-out across the pond, and he and she drifted along the shore, and he sat silent while she told him stories of the town in which she had lived and the people in that fo her) great assemblage of humanity. Many Sunday they wandered together in the woods and out in the clear ing along the bank of the lake, brushing through thick masses of fern that filled the sunny atmosphere with delicious odor.
 After the first few months of their acquain- tance, when he was twelve and she ten years old, he had begun to regard her as the dependence of his life, and so to look to her for help. It was hard work to bring himself to confess to her that he did not know how to read; but he did it, and asked her to teach him. There was 8 rock among the sweet-scented fern by the shore, where in the pleasant Sunday mornings she gave him regularly four hours lesson. She was not long in teaching him all she knew, and after that they progressed together
 They talked much, and thought much. She told him Bible stories, and they were about the only..stories she knew except two or three wonderful fairy stories which he and she mixed up with Bible stories, until they grew wiser, new settlers came and brought books, which they borrowed Much they learned out of their own heads, reading together and giving each to the other, in childish wise ways, their deductions and reasonings abou. things visible and invisible, things of earth and things unearthly if not heavenly Do you imagine their deductions were worthlesss Nay, the ratiocinations of a boy and girl about the infinite and invisible are just as valuable in result as are those of the philosophers fill all the thousand pages of modern books, They learned as much