THAT BOY OF YOURS SYMPATHETIC STUDIES OF BOYHOOD BY JAMES S. KIRTLEY HODDER & STOUGHTON NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY //Q.79'7 Copyright, 1912, By George H. Doran Company FOKEWORD This book has been written for all the friends of the boy, including his kindred, guardians, teachers and neighbours. My point of view is not technical: it is first of all that of a former boy. The consciousness of being an ex-boy has never left me and my frequent lapses into the estate of boyhood have been among the most in- forming and refreshing experiences of my life. Most of the chapters ef this book have been writ- ten during those relapses. My point of view has been corrected and confirmed by efforts, extend- ing over a number of years, to do something for boys and with them: those efforts having been of more value to me than to the boys. I have also sought to avail myself of the knowl- edge brought to us by specialists in physiology, psychology and pedagogy, though I frankly con- fess that some of their views do not always ac- cord with those that I have gained from experi- ence and observation. These thirty-seven chapters seek to give sug- gestive answers to as many questions about the boy. If they serve that purpose the reader will be able to furnish his own answers to the thou- sand and one other questions that are sure to come up in connection with every boy. 464763 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I His TABLE OP CONTENTS 1 II His BODY 7 III His APPETITE 16 IV His CURIOSITY 23 V His POWER OP IMITATION 29 VI His IMAGINATION 35 VII PAST AND FUTURE 44 VIII His ILLS AND EPOCHS 51 IX His SPORTS 60 X His EMPLOYMENTS 68 XI His POSSESSIONS 77 XII His SPARE TIME 81 XIII His LOOKS 87 XIV His GANG 93 XV His CHUMS 99 XVI His HEROES 104 XVII His SWEETHEARTS 109 XVIII FORMING His HABITS 116 XIX CULTIVATING His WILL 122 XX BEING His OWN MAN , 129 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXI THE BOY PRODIGY . . . . v . . 136 XXII ORGANISING BOYS . . . . . . . 142 XXIII His MOTIVES . .... . . . 149 XXIV His FAILINGS ........ 157 XXV His PUNISHMENTS ...... 165 XXVI His TROUBLES 171 XXVII THREE PERILS 176 XXVIII His HOME . . 183 XXIX His ROOM 190 XXX His FATHER . . 194 XXXI His BROTHER AND SISTER .... 200 XXXII His READING 206 XXXIII His TEACHER 212 XXXIV His LONG APPRENTICESHIP .... 219 XXXV His COLLEGE LIFE . . . . . .225 XXXVI His VOCATION 234 XXXVII His RELIGION . 240 THAT BOY OF YOURS HIS TABLE OF CONTENTS His life is a volume and its contents are volumi- nous. Sometimes we feel like calling it a "sacred volume " and again a "volume of fantastic lore." It becomes a story an epic, in time but, to start with, it often has the disconnectedness of a dic- tionary. It would not be hard to make out a boy's "table of contents " if he were only a "little man," as he is sometimes, playfully or patronisingly, called. But he is not a "little man," any more than his father is a "big boy," or a caterpillar is a little butterfly. He is a prospective man, an enfolded man, as his father is an unfolded boy. The differ- ence between him and a man is not a difference in quantity, or quality, but the difference between enfoldedness and unfoldedness. When he starts out to be a boy, he is more like a little beast and many things that make the dif- ference between a man and a beast make no differ- ence to him. The saving fact, though, is that he is a man in embryo. If the evolutionist is right, 1 2 THAT BOY OF YOUKS the animal structure which he possesses has trav- elled all the way from the protozoan to his present place as heir apparent to the crown of creation. The earth of the animal has not all fallen off yet and will not, with his consent, till he begins his preparations to quit being a boy. The differ- ences between him and the beasts of the field will begin to show themselves as his awakening con- sciousness gets hold of the task of controlling him. He is an animal and we are not allowed to forget that, at any time in his career ; but he is more, by the measure of infinity. There's variety in a boy. The manifold phys- ical hungers and thirsts of the animal are in all his senses and they keep all the sources of supply at work, day and night. Through the wonderful nervous system, the nexus between him and his body, by which he expresses himself and initiates his > enterprises, his body is so tied up with the mental and moral that its health and purity re- quire the same care as do the finest elements and essences. His physical elements are, of course, the same, in number, as in grown people. Some of them are in action, some dormant, some quies- cent ; some subordinate, while others are in control such as love and hatred, hope and fear, sense of justice, appreciation of the beautiful, the sublime and the true, and all the powers of thought and will. But even his most active powers are imma- ture and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish one from another. His power of observation is awake HIS TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 before that of decision, his feelings control earlier than his reason, his reason before his will and his will before his conscience. His sense of the worth and the rights of others comes late. But all such statements must be general. We cannot time the entries as by a watch and say: "In three years and six days, his intellect will arrive and begin work"; or "When the clock strikes his twelfth year, instead of the blind impulses that have been controlling him, his will power will awaken and assume the control of his career." It must also be said that the varied elements of his nature are not very well acquainted with each other, to begin with. Mutual misunderstandings among them take up much of his energy. The feelings get into trouble with their neighbours, the judgment and the conscience. In the group of feelings discords will arise between the different kinds. Filial sentiments prompt him to obedience, as a son, while the food or play instincts may push him in a contrary direction. He often knows better than he does, better than he wants to do. He may never be able to grow out of that infirmity, en- tirely, but he may become less infirm, with the passing years. He may not have such self-con- trol that the remembrance of a stomach-ache, of the previous night, will wholly restrain all desire for the food that brought it on. He is somewhat like the climate of the Holy Land as described in a boy's composition: "The climate of Palestine 4 THAT BOY OF YOUES is very hot and mountainous, especially where the country is flat.". Further he doesn't seem to be very well ac- quainted with himself. He hasn't time to know himself he is too busy being a boy. He learns himself by piecemeal. He is sometimes shocked by what he discovers, sometimes awed, sometimes stricken with fear. When he learns his ability to swear or do a mean thing, he often recoils so thoroughly as never to go near that sin again. He is sometimes alarmed at finding what he lacks and what he cannot do. It is not conceit disap- pointed, but ignorance made aware of itself. At first he doesn't know the law of cause and effect. He is ready to pilot a boat, handle fire- arms, drive an auto or attempt any daring thing, without learning or license. Somewhere within that personality of his is a power capable of con- trolling and co-ordinating all his curious and con- flicting endowments in time, with some assist- ance. Another fact or two must be noted. While his immature powers are capable of almost limitless expansion, they are also susceptible to infection from without, with good or evil, in body, mind, heart and conscience. While expansion is from within, the material for expansion is without. The difference between his little body and the big body that is to be, he must gather from his en- vironment and build into himself. So his little body takes hold of his environment of food, air, HIS TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 water, light, and secures the rest of itself. His soul, vexed with the sense of its incompleteness, may lay hold of truth and fact and love and power and righteousness, as he finds them in nature and man and God, and grow into its full stature. In order to be prompted to self-expansion he has hungers, power of discrimination, assimilation, imitation and imagination. He is also capable of rebirth, through infection from without. Some new truth rushes in and there is birth of the mind ; some sweet love slips into the heart and there is a rebirth of the emotions ; some new beauty flames before the vision and there is a rebirth of the ideals and the whole life. Now, a few suggestions to his friends and kin- dred : First know his contents, at the start and at every stage. The study will be more fascinat- ing than any romance you ever read. Second read to him his table of contents; not all, at first, but as his understanding and self-con- trol allow him to make wise use of the knowledge. The pedagogical art reaches its highest achieve- ment as it aids you to put him in possession of the intimate facts of his unfolding and myste- rious powers, in a way to give him mastery of himself. Third till he wakens to the task of handling his forces, take control of him. He is lost, if some- one does not do this. Fourth put him in charge of himself as early as possible. Watch for the awakening of his 6 THAT BOY OF YOUES leading powers and train them for their supreme mission of self-direction. Fifth guard him against egotism and egoism, as well. The egotist thinks much of himself, the egoist much about himself both are to be pitied. Too intimate knowledge of himself, at the imma- ture stage, will make him both egotistical and egoistical. Both evils may be prevented and one means of prevention will be some example which will disclose his possibilities and stimulate his powers. That leads to the next suggestion. Sixth he must see the realization of his ideals, must see the finished volume, in the person of his father, or some near and dear one, and be led, thereby, to aspire and hope. Play with other boys and a generous amount of work are usually directive toward perfection. He is an instinctive imitator ; he needs something worth imitating ; he needs to have right motives implanted. II HIS BODY THERE is only one other earthly object as at- tractive as a well-built, growing lad and one can guess that that is a growing girl. The invisible angels must be around him, taking notice and get- ting points. He has a sense of reverence, too, for angelic or other eminent beings. We are compelled to confess the accuracy of the Psalmist's words and say, he is " fearfully and wonderfully made." Muscle and mind and morals ; blood and bone and brain and brawn and body in general ; playing and praying and pound- ing and, sometimes, pouting; jumping and jolting and jollying and jostling such is the medley brought to our view by a boy. He is not all body, by any means, but he is all there in his body, and, if it is not in a condition to perform its functions and duties, he is usually very unhappy ; if it is ready to co-operate with him in his plans, it is his delightful and confidential friend. Sickness is tragical. When he must lie in the house and hear the merry voices of his mates at play, it is one of the acutest sorrows of his boyhood. His body is the house in which he lives and it 7 8 THAT BOY OF YOURS is the instrument with which he achieves his pur- poses. It is a movable house and can find footing and keep its equilibrium at any level or angle, between the basement and the cornice just out- side the window of the top floor. He loves to make use of his body for falling out of bed in his sleep, swinging his legs out of the third story win- dow, jumping from the barn loft, sliding down the banister without touching his hands, riding a bucking broncho, climbing up the water spout, yelling himself hoarse and everybody else deaf. It is a fine house and a great instrument. He usually has to fight for his body and then he fights with it. There is an early age, which each of us can at least partially remember, when predatory diseases were hounding us, and, for one boy who escaped, at least three fought it out mumps, measles and the whole list. Sometimes he lost his house and was evicted, but usually he held possession, though, now and then, a window was dimmed, or cracked, or broken, or some use- ful or ornamental part was injured. He is bat- tling for a good constitution, the foundation of his house. It is claimed that between eight and twelve, he is fighting for and adopting his consti- tution. The rest of the time, till he is twenty-five, he is evidently working out his by-laws. His passion for running all sorts of risks is one of his early perils and it is inveterate. It seems scarcely possible for him to escape the fracture of a bone. The doctor had to be called, two differ- HIS BODY 9 ent times, to come and put my wrecked collar bone into proper connection with the rest of my ana- tomical structure, and just how he escaped being called twenty times, for similar services, I can't understand. And it was before the rage for the ' present style of football, too. Once a horse I was riding allowed himself to become excited by my intemperate effort to get up speed, and the other time a neighbour boy with whom I was wrestling had too much muscle for me. But there was val- uable education in it all for me. As the house in which he lives and the instru- ment with which he works, his body is astonish- ingly adapted to his purpose. He fills the house full. He and the instrument are a part of each other. It not only executes his thought but ex- presses it, as well. The deaf and dumb show its possibilities, as they put the most profound truths and delicate feelings into the postures of the body, the movements of the hands and the ex- pression of the face. If the body is the instru- ment for revealing the mind, it ought to be the cleanest, keenest, readiest, strongest, best trained instrument possible. It is also a measure, though not the only measure, of the mind's power. Dr. W. T. Porter of St. Louis and Dr. Charles Roberts of England have examined many thousand school children and have reached the conclusion that there is a definite relation between the size, weight, chest and girth, on the one side and the intellect, on 10 THAT BOY OF YOURS the other. If the boy is made up of soul and body, he reaches perfection in the degree in which the two suit each other and work together, under the complete control of the mind. The body does still more for him. It reacts upon him, and he upon it. Air, light and mois- ture affect the nerve cells and modify his states of mind. If he has not been taught to control himself and all his powers, he will become the plaything of fitful circumstances. The interplay of the two is more singular in a boy than in a man. It is claimed that great agony may so ex- cite the nerves as to turn the hair grey in one night. Anger may paralyse the motor nerves, especially those of speech, though it sometimes stimulates them. Emotion, especially fear, may prostrate like sickness. A thought may start the sensor nerves and the motor nerves may follow. When a boy thinks of fruit, on returning from school in the afternoon, his mouth waters. That's the sensor nerves. Then he goes right to where the fruit is. That's his motor nerves. We have been taught, in many ways, that the mind may get so fully in command of the body as to reshape it, protecting it from injury and imparting to it a higher quality of beauty and strength. Conservation of bodily strength, through clean- liness and fresh air, is the first thing needed. Physical health is a mental and moral asset. The development of the body is a discipline of the boy. To train the hand is to teach the heart. The edu- HIS BODY 11 cation of muscle and mind goes on at one time. The other day the physical director of a Y. M. C. A. Boys' department told me he always insists that a boy must keep his body clean and go into details in doing so. He must keep his finger-nails and toe-nails trimmed and clean, see that the nasal passages are open, look after his eyes and ears and especially his throat. It is important for his mental and moral, as well as physical, good. Of course, parents have to do this for him till he gets the habit of doing it for himself and he will get the habit as soon as he sees that something is dependent on it or sees someone, on whom he is dependent, taking care of himself in the right way. A boy usually has a distinct aversion to washing, on the ground that he will soon get dirty again. A boy sent away from the table to wash his face came back with only slight improvement, but re- plied to the complaint with which he was greeted, "I washed all right, but didn't think it necessary to go into details." It is almost as important as life itself to have him cleanly. It adds to his self-respect and makes him careful in other things. It develops self-con- trol and is a mental and moral discipline. But, at first, he cannot understand much you are doing for him, in keeping him clean, rather, in compell- ing him to keep himself clean. Family worship is superior, in value, only to family cleanliness. Conservation, through chastity, is a serious necessity. At a certain age of storm and stress 12 THAT BOY OF YOUES his greatest peril is through his sex organisation, and he can be mightily helped, at the most critical period, by keeping his body clean, while, at the same time, you give him the right amount of knowledge of his vital physical functions, and some conception of his physical sacredness. The advice given Wendell Phillips by his mother when he started off to college, is just the thing for the young boy of the household : "My son, keep your linen clean, read your Bible every day and let plenty of fresh air into your room." Any form of dissipation is waste of vital ma- terial which he will be sure to need in some emer- gency. After smoking like a locomotive for a number of years, I quit it for three reasons. It cost me one hundred cents for every dollar I spent and that was a dead loss to me and to others; it was using up good nerve force that I afterwards found I needed very much ; it was an example for some young fellows to whom I didn't want to teach the art of smoking. A good way to help a boy avoid that kind of waste is through his talent for imitating. No mention need be made right here of the right kind of food, cooked right and served in generous quantities, for that will come in the next chapter. The essential thing is that he be put in entire charge of his body as soon as possible, with ac- curate and reverent knowledge of all its functions, the ordinary and extraordinary, the general and HIS BODY 13 special. The brain is of full size by the time he is sixteen and he must be in wholesome control of his body by that time. Something more must be said about the part his muscles play in his life. Their weight is 43 per cent, of the weight of the whole body and they are the instruments for executing the purposes of the will and of training it, the organs for the expres- sion of the thoughts and feelings in almost endless ways, the instruments of digestion, and the means of expression of the life in all its deeds. Motor discipline is mental development. The culture of the muscles reacts on the brain cells as nothing else does. To quote from Dr. G. Stanley Hall: "Muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imita- tion, obedience, character, and even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is cardinal and is now coming to due recognition; and for all, education is incomplete without a mo- tor side. Skill, endurance and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of self- control and poise, muscular faults." The farm is the best place for motor develop- ment. The accumulation of muscular power in boyhood is the laying up of treasures for the day of need. The present is a time of great peril to his muscles. In the factories and offices only a few of them are called into use, and in all activities, machinery relieves him of so much that no one who 14 THAT BOY OF YOUBS lives in the city is capable of proper maturity un- less lie secures scientific physical training. There is a principle in nature called the conver- sion of energy, by which force passes from lower to higher forms; for example, as light, heat and electricity. So our bodily powers are to be con- verted into love-force, aesthetic-force, mental-force, social-force. One of the problems most likely to vex his par- ents and friends is his irregular growth. Some- times his bones grow faster than his muscles and sometimes the muscles are in the lead ; and, all the time, mysterious powers are awaking. That re- quires cleanliness. The old Mosaic teachings gave the Jews a most sanitary law. The physicians of to-day have learned that the old Hebrew rite is well-nigh essential to the well-being of the boy and of untold value in his mental and moral life. Some day the parents who neglect that provision against bodily and moral disease will be the ex- ception to the general rule. To summarise: there must be development of strength through food, work, play, physical ex- ercise of special kinds and cheerfulness; conser- vation of power, through cleanliness, chastity, self-control, service; refinement of power, by; conversion into the higher form of force ethical, religious, mental, aesthetic, social, through mind treatment and control of all bodily functions and organs; and the consecration of each and all to life's sublime purposes. This is the task; it is not HIS BODY 15 small. Nature expects him to achieve his long and difficult task, in the three old ways, listening to precepts knowledge; imitating examples in- spiration ; trying to do it experience. ni HIS APPETITE THIS is a capacious subject, wide, deep and long. A boy, when asked if he could name the three graces, replied: "Yes; breakfast, dinner and supper." The answer is instructive. He must have food because he has a body to build, a house in which his growing soul can have plenty of room to expand; it must become the enduring and reli- able instrument for accomplishing his mission in the world. In building that body he must put into it reserves on which he can make unlimited drafts for meeting life 's duties and exigencies. A grown man's body has already been built and he needs only enough food to keep up the repairs and decorations and enable him to do his work; a boy has to take in enough, each day, to go on with the building, keep up the repairs, do the decorat- ing, achieve his mission, as a boy, and put some- thing in the reserve fund besides. He starts in at a rapid pace, seeking refreshments every waking hour, and by the time he is fifteen or twenty, he has reached a speed that is as exciting to the onlookers as it is exhilarating to himself. His reputation, in that respect, stands on the solid foundation of achievement. A teacher, in 16 HIS APPETITE 17 talking with some friends about the gustatory habits of certain animals, said : "Now, the cater- pillar will eat six hundred times its own weight, in one month's time," and an old lady, somewhat deaf, leaned over and asked: "Whose boy did you say?" A large part of his food supply is used up in his activities. His first six years are his most active time and he doesn't slow up much till he is six- teen. His heaviest eating is at that time, just as he is finishing his brain structure. Each man with a spark of memory can confirm these statements from his own experience. In the spring time, down on the farm, I used to go out to the field in the morning with all the pockets in coat and trousers full of apples, and come back at noon with all those apples inside of me, but ready for a dinner of ham and eggs and cabbage and potatoes and milk and two kinds of hot bread, and pie, or cobbler, and the rest. History would re- peat itself in the afternoon, and an equal load of apples would be taken to the field, to prevent utter starvation and to prime the appetite for supper. An iron constitution was the result of those mar- velous gastronomic feats, to say nothing of the unusual amount of work I was thereby enabled to accomplish, at ploughing and other jobs. If the boy in question lives in the country, as I did, and ploughs corn, as I did when I couldn't get out of it, he can plough all day, as I did, when I simply had to, eat three suppers at once, as I 18 THAT BOY OF YOURS never failed to do, go to bed and plough all night as I always did and if he sleeps with his older brother, as I did, he can make that brother wish he had never been born; then he will be ready for a couple of breakfasts and for work, while his brother will mope around and regret the day he formed the acquaintance of his younger brother. But that's really another story. Now, as he would have to have that food for these sacred purposes, whether he liked food or not, what a fortunate thing it is that he really likes it. Otherwise, eating would be mere drud- gery, like the work of the roustabouts loading a steamboat while the mate drives and curses and threatens them. As it is, taking on those supplies is one of the delights of his boyhood. That appetite of his, unless it is tampered with, is one of the most intelligent of all the faculties with which he works, and it helps him solve some vital and far-reaching problems. Later on, his judgment will help, when it learns how, but his appetite is looking after his interests all the time by desiring food, discriminating, appropriating and discarding. The building he is erecting and the machine he is constructing out of his food re- quire three things a great variety of material, the best quality and large quantities, as before mentioned. We get a good idea of the variety required from the analysis of the human body which scientists have made. It is found to have lime, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, iron HIS APPETITE 19 and some other ingredients and they all go into the body as food, except what comes in as air, which is mainly oxygen. They have to be in the right proportions, too. Imagine the result if he gets too much lime and runs to bones ; or oxygen and becomes flighty and fighty. Too much phosphorus will turn him into a will o* the wisp. No boy, no doctor, could tell, for the life of him, exactly the proportion in which he should com- bine these ingredients, at a given time, and there is where his intelligent appetite comes to his aid and saves the day. To prevent neglect of eating, nature keeps him hungry all the time, and to keep him from overstocking himself with any one chemical element she gives his appetite a desire for the thing he needs, at a given time. An appe- tite that works normally is better than a doctor or a trained nurse. When he needs acids it prompts him to lemonade, or pickles, or butter- milk, or fruit. When he needs alkalies, or fats, the signal comes in at the proper time and in a convincing way. He is always obedient to the inner light on this duty. Of course, if his appe- tite is mistreated, it loses its discrimination and skill. That is one reason I am writing on the subject. In this building scheme, his parents are usually the superintendents of construction, while he is contractor and builder. By and by, he will take over their part as well as his own. They have to get him trained to take complete charge. 20 THAT BOY OF YOURS Is he equal to the task of providing the material in sufficient quantity and quality and variety? He is apt to get enough if it is in reach. And this is where responsibility rests on somebody. If any one is to be denied the required food, it must be the grown person, who has finished his building projects, and not the boy, whose structure is now going up and must not be interfered with. Even though his appetite remains unperverted and decides, with accuracy, what he needs at a particular time, he requires the assistance of ex- perienced people to keep it in a sound and trust- worthy condition till he can acquire a sufficient stock of knowledge and experience to keep it safe and sane. It is definitely known to grown people, though not to him till he is taught it, that tobacco and alcohol always impair the functions of the body. The judges of our juvenile courts say that the cigarette fiend is a hopeless case. We do not protect our boys against dangers from appetite as we should. It looks big to chew and smoke and it appeals to a boy's unregulated vanity; it makes him seem like an older person and that appeals to his passion to imitate the older boys. As well poison the food itself as the power by which he selects and judges and digests his food. But the most serious fact is that his food has so much to do with his mind and character. Chemical changes in the body, due to food, are paralleled by changes in his emotions. His soul HIS APPETITE 21 throbs to his heart-beats. At the time when the physical hungers are greatest, the mind and heart hungers are most restless and eager. As the ab- sorption of food increases the soul gathers love and truth and all the elements of character more rapidly. The two processes are suggestively synchronous. Character takes tone from its fleshly home. Food seems to get built into the mind and the emotions. The conversion of meat into man, of food into feeling, is a true and an interesting process which we might well wish to watch closely. Food be- comes blood and blood builds bones and muscles and nerves and brain tissues, and, from that physical basis, we get the power to think and feel and will and do. So thoughts and books and pictures and statues and music and achievements come from that food. Longfellow well says: "He that drinks wine thinks wine, he that drinks beer thinks beer." The boy has the right, then, to have good food and enough of it and to have the wise oversight of those who are over him. Whatever of love-value and thought-value and will-value and art-value is in food he must be taught to find, and to release and take only those values in his selection and use of it. The destruction of values is one thing; the utilisation of values another. When one takes in liquor, he wasts that much money, besides the injury to his body. The values of the food may 22 THAT BOY OF YOUES be lost by too rapid eating. Haste and nervous- ness lead to the galloping style of eating. The boy may not Fletcherise, but he may be taught to put himself into his eating, which is next in im- portance to putting the eatables into himself. He should chew as long as he can teach himself to enjoy that particular mouthful. Eating is an art which he must be taught as he is taught the art of painting, or bookkeeping, or printing, or engineering. IV HIS CURIOSITY THERE is a time when the "Boy Question " is yery largely a matter of the boy's questions. And that is no small matter. He conducts what may be called a questionaire. He is a disciple of Socrates. It is a continuous affair, with no recess or vacation. He does it for the same reason that he plays he can't help it. When he finds an agi- tation going on in his brain and nerves and mus- cles and bones, and all of them telling him to play, and good opportunities for play all around him, what else can he do? And when there is such a noisy agitation in his soul compelling him to learn, with so many things to look into, what can he do but ask about them? The mysteries of stars, suns, moons, snow and hail, steam, electricity, grey hairs, bald heads, and a million other things must be explained and on the spot. He never knows that he sometimes gets himself disliked. If he did he would want to know why, and all about it. He is not "stuck up," to use a phrase that he will understand at once, but enlists every one he meets as a co-laborer in his pursuit of knowledge, reserving his father for special co- operation during the latter 's hours of rest. He 23 24 THAT BOY OF YOUES is not partial nor dilatory, but takes up every matter as it comes for immediate investigation. He works rapidly and can inquire into a great variety of subjects in the same breath. He has to ask questions in order to give his strenuous grey matter something to do, and he needs the knowledge that he seeks. To be sure he can learn by looking, but he can't gather in- formation that way quite as fast as he can store it away in his memory, and laying things in store is his main business. Besides, there is so much to learn that he will never get his share unless he avails himself of all possible assistance. And, come to think of it, what else are the other people here for but to put him in possession of what they have? By and by he will be able to dispense with a few questions not "let up," but only slow up and reason out certain things alone, but not yet; for the activity and the thirst for knowledge and the questions begin with his first words, and reason will not take up the task till he is somewhat older. You may say that from three to thirteen, he is an interrogation mark. During that time he might find an inviting vocation for his shining gifts as a lawyer to conduct cross-examinations, or a chief of police to preside over the sweat box and administer the "third degree." He is getting discipline and knowledge, and he is "getting the habit," which is better still. He is preparing to get along without asking questions, HIS CURIOSITY 25 which is not a bad thing. His active mind is send- ing impressions along the brain cells and marking out a permanent path for truth to travel, and he is also acquiring the material which reason will use some day, in its work. Even at the worst he is more than a combination of muddy clothes, noise and questions. Besides the good he is getting think of what he is giving. Think of how he is driving his father, especially, down into his own inner life and back into his own boyhood's history to learn the significance of all this questioning, thus leading him to wholesome introspection and inspiring recollection, and mak- ing him a bright, new, up-to-date man. Think of the fine intellectual drill he is taking his father through, as he puts to him questions that would puzzle lawyers, and scientists, and philosophers and theologians, questions which his father must unravel and answer sensibly. And the boy always knows when the latter is talking sense, even though the question may not be much better than some civil service questions. When Artemus Ward wrote his grotesque travesty of the list of life insurance questions, he was prob- ably in a reminiscent mood and was reviving an old boyhood trick: "Are you male or female? If so, how long have you been so?" Think of the ready market the boy furnishes for your stores of knowledge, when perhaps he is the only living being who would listen at all. An at- tentive listener like him is not picked up every 26 THAT BOY OF YOUES day. You might write newspaper articles and whole books without finding the hospitality for your ideas that a boy will give when you answer his questions. It is to many a rare chance that may never come again. No one can question the educational value of questions, both for ques- tioner and questioned. To suppress them is to suppress him ; to direct and answer them is to dis- cipline and develop him; to do it in the spirit of co-operation is to enter into a sacred partnership with him. We come to see that his curiosity is the divinely established method by which he passes from ignorance to knowledge, from weakness to strength. It is the same spirit of investigation that will lead him and many other men to climb mountains, explore the unknown corners of the world, torture nature until she reveals her secrets, and make contrivances different from any that have been known heretofore. The boy 's curiosity is the condition of the man's culture, his questions are the prelude to his conquests, his dissatisfac- tions the means of his discipline. There are right ways to meet his questions and, first of all, we must recognise his right to ask questions and to receive the right kind of answers. To discourage them is to encourage ignorance and weaken his desire for knowledge. To refuse to listen to them is to refuse to learn his nature and needs. A shrewd parent can learn more from a child's questions than the child can learn from his HIS CURIOSITY 27 answers. Answers require truth and wisdom. The opportunity to teach and train, by answering questions, is one which any parent may covet. But it is not in questions alone that his curiosity shows itself. It prompts the boy to all kinds of destructiveness simply because he wants to see what things are made of. His toys become tire- some if he can not make them yield that desired knowledge. A clock that only keeps time is a poor thing to him. If he can take it to pieces it is a good clock, even though he never gets it together again. This method of investigation, by dis- section, is the one he will use as a physician or geologist or chemist or inventor ; and he is learn- ing how, while a boy. Every boy has a right to toys and blocks and implements that he can in- vestigate in that way. A man who understands a boy's curiosity and knows how to deal with it is master of priceless knowledge. One who sup- presses those questions ought to be suppressed; one who never excites them must be abnormal. His curiosity holds in it the germs of reverence for the transcendent, rulership over the dependent and fellowship with the personalities involved in his search for truth. The treatment his curiosity calls forth may break down reverence or build it up, make him a prince or a puppet in the realm into which his curiosity leads him; may estab- lish him in the friendship of the eternal, or drive him back into selfish pauperism. Every answer- able question ought to be studied out, if you have 28 THAT BOY OF YOUES not an answer at once, but it will also prove very wholesome to him when you confess your igno- rance and thereby enter into comradeship with him in the search for truth. HIS POWER OF IMITATION Two indispensable powers possessed by the boy are imagination and imitation. They awake early and work until he is dead. With him imitation is not limitation; it is life and enlargement. He is like the chameleon that takes its hues from its environment. At the start he acts on blind impulse, automatic at that, as he swings about and grasps at every- thing from his mother to the moon. From ir- regular action to unconscious imitation is an easy and unobserved transition. Soon he gets to imitating consciously and he never stops. Nature was wise in ordaining it so. That is the way he grows, for imitation is ap- propriation. He answers your smile with a smile, your frown with a similar frown, your love with love, your hatred with hatred. He does this at first without knowing it, then he does it purposely, and by this time he has the habit. He walks because he sees other folks walking, likes the idea and takes over the diversion. And the risks he runs are numerous and various. If he were reared among animals he would probably walk on all fours and chatter or grunt as they do, 29 30 THAT BOY OF YOUES and perhaps consider his occasional impulses to stand on his pastern joints as a strange discom- fort. When he is brought up entirely with grown up people he is old while young a grown up be- fore he grows up. He plays because no, I sup- pose he would play anyhow; but he plays in the way he does because he sees others play that way. He is a reflector long before the reflective a^e, the tones and sentiments and manners of the people around him finding an embodiment in him and a second expression by him. Not that he is just an echo. He knows how to wake the echoes himself; but he also knows how to echo and he does it. He never went to a circus in his life with- out wanting to get up one at home, and doing it. Attending fires is one of the solemn duties of his boyhood, and, if domestic sentiment was not too strong against it, he would have them at home; though attending to the fire is not in his line. He learns to swim by watching others, and the frogs. He plays church and school ; sings and scolds ; yells at the smaller members of the family or com- munity in the same terms and tones that were used on him all a matter of reflection. He is not contented that he has only imitation. He has initiative. He is original. It was a boy that saw the steam lift the lid off his mother's tea- kettle and got up an imitation that has lifted the life of mankind. If we could trace the history of aeronautics, we would find that some boy started that form of enterprise by making a descent from HIS POWEE OF IMITATION 31 the barn loft with his father's umbrella for a parachute, or that some man did it with the gift of imitation cultivated so carefully in boyhood. He learns to apply the most recondite knowledge to the most common conditions. There are some things a boy naturally imitates, with more or less ease, simply because he is a boy ; then there are some things he imitates at one stage and others at another. There may be an unspoiled, but not an unsoiled, simplicity of boyhood. The dainty little girl will keep her white dress and pink ribbons up to the standard of the angels whom she imitates; while the dirty little boy will emerge from the puddle where he has had a good time with his friends, the pigs, whom he imitates when he can. His words betray him odd words, big words, long words, lurid words. They show their origin. The waiting boy in the reception-room of a wealthy and cultured Bostonian's office made me feel that I was talking to my host himself. Words that express strong feeling in a picturesque, acrid, or even a profane way, appeal to him. Slang is his favourite vehicle of expression. He remembers all he hears and can reproduce it. It is the ob- jective, the active, the large that wins him, at first. He imitates actions as well as words; gathers the ideals as well as actions ; most of all feels the spell of compelling personalities. Those two lads, sons of Jack Abernethy, United States Marshal for Oklahoma, who rode horseback all the way 32 THAT BOY OF YOUES from Oklahoma to New York to serve on the re- ception committee when Eoosevelt was welcomed home from Africa, enjoyed that trip far more than if they had gone in a palace car, because their adored " Teddy" and their father were Bough Eiders. The boy is a hero worshipper from the beginning. It is the man he imitates. He would rather be like some fascinating man than be an angel for a while at least. In the first stage, from one to six years, his life is automatic and impulsive, and what appeals to those impulses he imitates. During the next stage the impulse gets differentiated. He is a natural insurgent from eight to twelve. The strain on him is terrific as his habits get formed. It must have been of the boy of this stage that Carlyle said ought to be brought up in a barrel and fed through the bunghole. But it was only Carlyle who said it. He never had a boy, though his father had. In this second stage he is forming habits. In the first stage he imitates actions; in the second stage, words and the habits of mind back of the words ; in the third stage, though he imitates less, he copies after ideals and social habits. Back of all this imitation there is the hunger and thirst for completing himself, creative self-expres- sion, though he doesn't know what it is. It shows the truth of the old saying that example is better than precept, because it contains both and makes them practical. It is better than punishment. HIS POWER OF IMITATION 33 Imitation is always in the direction of his in- terests and those interests are such as appeal to his activities. He likes the concrete, the simple. He thinks of God's activities rather than his at- tributes, of His powers rather than His moral perfections. He enjoys nature not as the scien- tist, but as the hunter, the farmer, the traveller or the stockman does. He gets all the geology and ornithology he wants by throwing rocks and find- ing birds' nests. He goes on the principle, held unconsciously, that ideas are made for embodi- ment in actions ; grown people may express theirs in words,* but works alone are capable of fitly speaking his own. So when he finds any action he likes, he imitates it, though he reproduces words and tones and habits of speech as well. This is also a divine arrangement for his growth. The result of imitation is enlargement of life and habit. Thus he comes to the mastery of him- self. If those in charge of him are wise they will: 1. Take advantage of his impulse to imitate and give him the play that will develop it. 2. In his next stage they will make the play more or less dramatic, always accurate; will awaken interest as well as impulse; attract, draw, rather than drive; aim to give him what is worth imitating in thought, words and character. 3. In the latter stage give him comradeship that will develop his character. Almost every crim- inal could have been saved from crime by a proper 34 THAT BOY OF YOUES appeal to his instinct of imitation. Words, ac- tions, people, must be worthy of imitation. Thus he can be led from rocks and birds' nests to geology and ornithology; from impulse to habit; from imitation to origination; from build- ing houses with blocks to building blocks of houses and creating and conducting business enterprises. VI HIS IMAGINATION "SEEING things at night," is tame compared with the way a boy sees things with his eyes wide open, things that are not so, at that. At the time he is four or five years old the power to see the unseen, to make images of invisible things, is ac- tive and it is riotous when he gets into his teens. It is the same power we have, only it is about all he does have, while we are now, at least some of us are, or are supposed to be, in possession of judgment, reason and some other faculties that have gotten active enough to make us forget our imagination and in some instances to give up the image-making business altogether. But, in the boy, the imagination is one of the first faculties awake and it is hard at work when reason and the will and judgment and conscience first open their eyes. Up to that time it works without their as- sistance and is untethered. Two facts about him seem to contradict each other. One is that his acute senses make very accurate observations of real things ; the other, that his active imagination knows no bounds. It is not hard work, either; it does itself. In that case we call it passive imagination. There 35 36 THAT BOY OF YOUES is something in him like wings and they insist on flying. He does not yet care where they take him. So they flit from point to point, as they will, with- out restraint, or direction from reason or will. After awhile he will be able to hold that sight on an object as long as he wishes and his imagination will enter on a new phase. At first the things he remembers attract him most, and for that reason, some have called it mere memory ; yet it is some- times more. But when he begins to take charge of it, we say it is active imagination. And per- haps that is where we can appreciate Binet's re- mark that it is "the faculty of creating groups of images which do not correspond to any external reality." This day-dreaming is not wrong, either. He has to do it, whether right or wrong, though he may do it in a right or wrong way. In the first stage he is always turning some- thing into something else more to his liking, as when little Billie, standing by the post, began to turn an unseen faucet and catch unseen soda water in his real cup, making the fizz with his lips, and to call out: "Come on, boys, it's my treat;" everybody saw what Billie saw and drank his soda water, till they came to Joe, who showed he was a freak, by snarling out: "Naw; you ain't got no soda water; you know you ain't." He changes toys into soldiers and has them fight each other, makes his sisters fairies and another little girl a queen. He says: "I am a coachman," and he is one. One minute he is Theodore Eoosevelt at HIS IMAGINATION 37 the head of his Bough Eiders, and the next minute the same dashing leader, charging the hippopot- ami in Africa. Henry Mills Alden says that genius is creative imagination and ingenuity is its power of insight. At times it makes him seem only a precocious perverter of truth, but it has never dawned on him that he is anything but scientifically accurate. With that magic wand he transforms deserts into gardens, fills his pockets with gold, beholds cats turn into tigers, dogs into bears and himself into a prince with chariots and attendants and heroic halos, or into anything else he pleases. He was, without doubt, the one who gave points to Ibsen in the creation of Peer Gynt. Little Ned's imagi- nation worked in such daring ways that his mother forbade it, like those good men who forbade the comet coming nearer our earth. One day, in spite of warnings, he came in with: "Oh, Mamma, I saw a great, big, black bear out in the orchard. " Of course she rebuked him and then inquired of his older sister, who said with great contempt in her voice: "It was only a little black dog!" She solemnly took him upstairs and said: "Now, Ned, go into that room, kneel down and tell God how naughty you were and ask him to forgive you." He cheerfully went in and presently came out with a smiling face. "And did you tell God and ask him to forgive you?" "Yes, and, Mamma, he said the first time he saw that dog, he thought it 38 THAT BOY OF YOUES was a bear, too." That was when Ned was very small, before he was eight years old and he lived in a world of make-believe. His mother may have spoiled him ; she may have explained to him that it was "play," and thereby saved him. He may even go so far as to transform himself into another person say the king of England, or Mr. Eockef eller, or Capt. Kidd, or an Indian Chief. He and his chum have been known to exchange personalities in a way that was quite real. In play it is one of the easiest things for him to become an Indian. "When he came in, the other evening, from play, muttering: "S 'blood! I have thee!! Unhand me, villain!!!" you knew what had been going on. Sir James Mackintosh, at twelve, after reading Eoman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of Constantinople and devoted hours at a time to his arduous administrative duties. Ado- escence is the golden age of the imagination. That is what makes prodigies. After he is seven or eight, he sees things more in groups and connections; and still later, in his teens, his reason and purpose take charge of the aerial thing. Sometimes people succeed in killing it and, in that case, he is dead from that time on. The reason the Wrights and Curtiss and Hamilton and the other flyers can navigate the air is that they have been doing it in imagination, for a long time. So it is the magical power that begins, when he is very young, and stays with him till he dies, or till his heart dies. It is his Aladdin's HIS IMAGINATION 39 lamp whose rays disclose all he wishes and changes stones into crystals, his "Fortunatus' purse that holds the treasures of the universe. " It is the mother of his mirth, the spring of his smiles. It is closely and causally related to a sav- ing sense of humour. That is why a boy in Kan- sas City rose from his seat in a crowded street car when a fat woman entered and said : * ' Gentlemen, I will be one of three to get up and give this lady a seat. " Even his unconscious humour flows from this source, as when the teacher said: "Tommy, why do you think I scold so much?" " 'Cause you get kind o' fretful teachin' school, I s'pose," was his honest reply. There is no other way to explain how he can do so much he sees it beforehand. Mr. Ferris was told that, by the laws of mechanics, no such wheel was possible, but after long study, he suddenly saw that wheel, with his mind's eye, as he sat in a restaurant in Chicago; and then building it was the easiest part of it all. Von Moltke was in bed when the word came that France had declared war and he quietly looked in a certain pigeon-hole for several telegrams and said "Send them." Then he went to sleep again. He had foreseen it all and had every plan made. Imagination gives wings to his hope, feet to his reason, force to his decisions and vividness to his memory. It furnishes him invisible armour and victorious arms for his battle against the false and vicious and vulgar ; for he can picture to himself 40 THAT BOY OF YOUES the ideal, true and virtuous and good and then make them real. It enables him to secure control of himself at the time when he is becoming ac- quainted with his own volatile and mysterious pow- ers, for he can be made to see the vast benefits to come from such self-control. That is one reason why he enjoys the present so much and anticipates the future so eagerly he sees so much in them. And it may be added, that is the reason he can endure the present when older people treat him so unjustly on the ground that he is only a boy and it makes no difference how he is treated. In one respect he is like Moses who en- dured because he saw the invisible. A boy has that profound something in him which 1 we call subconsciousness. Imagination is the means of bringing in suggestions from the outside and taking them out again into the life. After awhile it does better than that it enables him to make suggestions to himself, and we call that auto-suggestion. The imagination is a servant willing to bring in any suggestion, even when it plays havoc with the life. Mrs. Lamoreaux tells of a speaker who, when talking to a Sunday-school about the fixed- ness of habits, said that if they wrote their names in the cement sidewalk while it was soft, the writ- ing would last as long as the walks. Of course the boys did the writing, without any loss of time. When he is very young, his imagination is a great convenience to the boy's parents, for he can HIS IMAGINATION 41 have the benefit of boat rides and car rides within doors, with the aid of chairs and brooms. Then when the reason begins to unfold, he uses it with vividness. When his memory is most active, from ten to fifteen, the imagination fairly riots. When the social instincts are getting into control, it makes him a hero worshipper ready for altruistic adventure, and as life looms up mysterious and fascinating, it gives him dreams of conquest. We must not forget that what he sees and hears and remembers is the material out of which his imagination forms the pictures which lure him on. We have heard the story of the woman who told the minister that her husband and two sons were lost at sea and now the youngest was anxious to become a sailor. He pointed to a picture on the wall, a vessel in full sail, and said : ' ' That picture will drive him to the sea." The vicious and ob- scene furnish material which fascinates the un- trained or wayward imagination. Our power is also our weakness. Our imagi- nation is more powerful now than it ever was before. It gives greater opportunity for mental and moral uncleanness and .enables the latter to break us down more rapidly. Much of the injury to boyhood is to be traced to an outraged imagina- tion. Personal care of the body gets aid from the im- agination, as the latter helps him fashion an ideal for his true self which always works towards health and symmetry and artistic excellence. A 42 THAT BOY OF YOUES good imagination is good hygiene. Experience and imagination join in teaching him to anticipate the results of a given action so vividly as to re- strain from the wrong and constrain to the right. The boy looks ahead. He will need that power in business, if he is a bootblack, or a merchant, or a lawyer, or a well, anything. But peril must be faced. If his imagination is not disciplined and if he is very fond of success, he may become a liar of the worst kind. After serving boyhood in such wholesome fash- ion, this power abides in manhood to perform an enlarged function in transforming ideas instead of things, dealing with ideals and changing the dreams of boyhood into the deeds of manhood. To check it is to turn the boy into a dwarf or a deceitful hypocrite. To direct it is to develop him ; to keep it chaste is to protect him. Fortunate for him if he lives in the country, where nature gives him vast spaces and her inspiring fellow- ship. Happier still if he lives in a home where all that he sees and hears becomes good material for the house of life which his imagination is building. Hall says: "The roots of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism. " Then play is important. In adolescence the boy longs for comradeship which he can idealise, and he thereby affords his parents a rare chance. The truths given to him in literature and in life HIS IMAGINATION 43 become the starting points of his idealising im- age-making. Manual activity is the best method of balancing and sobering his power of imagina- tion. vn PAST AND FUTURE IP some of the scientists are right, the boy had the same physical start as other animals, but has travelled farther and somewhere, on the way, a new power has got into him and made a differ- ence as wide as the universe between him and them. They also tell us that there are many remnants left in him, of former stages of life, like scaffolding left around a building after it is completed, and that he is a sort of recapitulation of all those stages; they say, also, that the stages of his moral, mental and religious growth corre- spond to the stages of growth which the race has made. But upon that point we need not linger, for it is only an unproven theory; observation shows, however, that he grows through stages which are as interesting as they are exciting. We know that while it was divinely arranged that he should have a physical origin and should bear a necessary likeness to his ancestors, a re- sponsible and epoch-making ancestor of his was made in the image of God, in his moral nature, and though there has been a break in the image, he is a descendant of that ancestor and still shows traces of the descent. Like produces like, even 44 PAST AND FUTURE 45 though there is some personal unlikeness. His heavenly origin is not to be forgotten. His body is not only divinely fashioned, but divinely fur- nished with its occupant, whether he is good or bad. His origin in God must be made a distinct con- sciousness with him, as soon as possible. He should learn that his body is made from matter which God created, and according to a pattern which He devised and worked out, whatever the physical agencies employed in the reproduction of the pattern; that his spirit is a reproduction, though a distorted one, of God's image. That is the thrilling truth about him and for him, a truth of which he must be put in possession, so as to make it vital and constructive in his life. It can be taught in simple, untechnical statements and in the form of life, the life of those who show that they have learned that same truth and are living it. I have been speaking of general human heredity. His personal traits, which make him the kind of a boy he is, are due to the kind of ancestors he has. Heredity is a great, serious, sometimes comical, but oftener, tragical, force with him. He is more apt to be like his immediate ancestors, yet, some- times, by a curious kind of perversity, he runs back into the generations and selects some ridicu- lous, or contemptible, trait and builds the freak- ish thing into the house of his life. That ancestor, or kinsman, may have been a pirate or a horse 46 THAT BOY OF YOUBS thief, who ought to have been hung long before he persuaded some woman to marry him. "Ata- vism" is the word which tells that a boy has run back to get his traits. No one knows when his child will do that foolish thing. The laws of hered- ity work in unusual ways at times. Fifty years ago an old monk Mendel of Brun got to study- ing this matter of heredity and got up a theory which, his followers have thought, explains the method of transmitting traits. But the simple fact is that a boy can't afford to have bad ances- tors. As a general thing, as already stated, the boy gets his traits from the nearest generation and that generation constitutes his environment as well as his heredity. His parents should be able to endow him with the very qualities he will need all his life and should see that he uses them ; if not, they have no right to undertake to endow him at all, no right to undertake him. As he has to take what they give him, they are the ones to whom I am most emphatically speaking. An- other thing to be noted is that he is a blend, which makes a new type, a product resulting from the union of two streams of ancestral traits, and he is different from the product of any other similar union in the history of the race. So there are some unchosen factors working in the production of the boy, many and mighty and mystifying his ancestors, remote and immediate, his place of birth and residence, his schools and PAST AND FUTUKE 47 companions, the atmosphere in which he lives. He cannot choose his parents, though I know some boys who must regret, to their dying day, that they didn't have that privilege. He has to take the kind of eyes, nose, teeth, chin, ears and feet they give him. You will not find one boy in a thousand who has not spent valuable time wishing his nose were of a different variety, or his lip not so long, or his feet not so ambitious. Even before girls get mixed up in his vision he is sure to utilise the mirror in making careful investigation of his de- fects. The community in which he is reared is not of his choosing and is regarded as not of his con- cern, though many a boy is ruined by it. When their parents died Tom was put into one family, Joe into another. Tom became a credit to the memory of his noble father; Joe was poisoned to the tips of his soul and life, poisoned forever by his environment. A boy's past often dominates his future. At- mosphere does it, and that is prepared for him. It may be heavy with unbearable burdens and lack of appreciation; or fetid with moral pollution; or too rare with adulation and false pleasures; or languid with enervating luxury ; or poisoned with hypocrisy and pretence. The atmosphere sur- rounding the earth seems to be a sort of exhala- tion of the earth itself, for it has in it some of the very elements found in the earth, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen. The atmosphere of the home is a com- 48 THAT BOY OF YOUES posite of the exhaled characters of those who make the home. All the difference between winter and summer is a matter of atmosphere. The streams were all locked beneath their walls of ice, the hills were sombre, the forests sere; but after a few weeks, the streams took up their springtime melody, the hills were "with verdure clad" and field and for- est were beautiful and brilliant with life itself. And the difference was a matter of atmosphere. Allied with this is the power of place. The poets of Greece were born, for the most part, where "the mountains look on Marathon and Marathon looks on the sea." Most of the poets of England were reared there where the sky bends with such ten- derness over the earth and reflects itself in the lakes that are set like mirrors in the framework of hill and mountain. Our own poets, as a rule, came from where the mountains lifted them to a purer air and a broader view, or where the sea is ever "rolling its profound, eternal base through nature's anthem," or breathing upon them like an inspiring spirit. The atmosphere exhaled from the boy's home, should contain love and wisdom and authority, so blended as to make it pure like that which billows around the throne of God. His atmosphere is not only unchosen by him but he seldom chooses his companions or teachers, they are thrust upon him. Sometimes those in authority try to thrust his profession upon him; PAST AND FUTUKE 49 they even attempt the daring sacrilege of select- ing a wife for him. We may know his past, personal and ancestral, but no one knows his future. His relation to his past is one of approvals, or repudiations. He has the power to turn against an unfortunate heredity and environment; he has the power to choose all that is noble in the past and present, and his fu- ture is largely shaped by his attitude toward his past. But nobody knows just what he will do with it all till after he has done it. He is the most uncertain of creatures. You can never tell his future from the way he looks and acts nor from the way his ancestors looked and acted. You can tell how a fox or a bee or a mule will turn out, but not a boy. He is related to the dust beneath his feet, to the stars aflame in the sky, to human life in all its phases of good and ill, in all its history, past, present and to come, to the God above who made him ; and just how he turns out will depend on how he gets himself related to this multiform environment of his. He has the divine gift of choice, but no one can forecast or force it. He was made that he might become perfect; will he even care enough about it to try the stupendous task I He has the power of imagination to pic- ture; will to purpose and perform; imitation to conform to the highest; capacity to receive new force and to use the greatest power of all, per- sonal force. He has kindred and friends who love 50 THAT BOY OF YOUES him enough to supply him with what he needs. He must determine his future and they often decide what he will determine. His unchosen factors may be bad, but he may choose a new environment and a heavenly ancestry, provided he is rightly^ aided. VIII HIS ILLS AND EPOCHS MUMPS and bumps, ills and epochs, await him. The first mentioned is only one of many diseases disputing his path or dogging his unsuspecting footsteps. Millions of microbes infest the air and certain squads seem to be detailed to concentrate on him the microbes of mumps and measles and chicken pox and whooping cough. They are on his trail and he receives them all with juvenile hos- pitality, or escapes through the vigilance of sleep- less guardians and through no precaution of his own. Beginning with colic and croup, he loves to range the whole gamut of pathological possibili- ties till he can stand on the summit of an immunity which they no longer dare invade. But if some of his ills are preventable, his epochs are experiences from which no vigilance of parents, or physicians, or teachers can protect him. Every psychologist in our country and in foreign countries has said so. Older people know it from experience. These entertainments along the way have been prepared for him and the invi- tation to him is mandatory. Each of those epochs is a time when some new power awakes in him, or develops signally, or en- 51 52 THAT BOY OF YOUES ters on a phase of special activity. He is never the same afterwards. Over the falls his life widens out and sometimes deepens; then come other falls and others still, till at last, he is out on the broad sea, where the currents of life are in great oceanic movements. Perhaps, in the future, we shall be able to prevent a majority of the dis- eases that now seem inevitable, but we can't keep him from his epochs. He never knows about them in advance, doesn't know them when they come, doesn't know they have come. He only knows he wants to do and to have certain things. It would be difficult to give him any idea of their real meaning. We know them ; we read, in every look and tone of his, that he is passing through the rapids; we know what those desires and expectations of his mean. He looks forward to the time when he can wear long trousers, play the fiddle, drive an auto, have a gun, shave and wear whiskers, and sing bass, or tenor, and even marry. If he knew everything that was to happen to him, he might drop out of the enter- prise before he has time to win. Now let us try to get an idea of each of his epochs and see just what it means ; this we can do by studying him and by harking back to our own boyhood days for verification. Three general periods are clearly distinguish- able infancy, from birth to six; childhood, from six to twelve ; adolescence, from twelve to twenty- two, or maturity. Then there are little turning HIS ILLS AND EPOCHS 53 points within these periods, so that we can say there are, at least, seven stages on his road to manhood. Their bounds can be fixed only in a general way, for we know that one boy may be seven or eight years in reaching the six-year stage, while another may reach it in five years. Let us look at it more in detail. First Babyhood proper, from birth to three years. Several clear marks are discernible through this period. Every action is automatic, at first. Senses gradually connect up with the outside world; sights and sounds and odours at last are identified. Imitation becomes the reg- nant law; the babe smiles and laughs and frowns in answer to your smiles and laughter and frowns. He is impatient, or loving, as you are. He does it automatically and you furnish the idea. Be care- ful. It is a golden period with him. Play is his chief diversion, but it is automatic and self-cen- tred. Give him play; give him something worth imitating. Control of him is necessary, but it is not difficult; it is really control of yourself. Second Infancy, from three to six or seven. Along about seven, he is gliding over the first falls, but, unless he is told, he will not know what it is, perhaps not till he goes off to college and studies psychology. Imitation is still the chief Jaw of his life, play his chief employment. Play has become more voluntary. He likes other chil- dren chiefly because he can play with them. By and by, he will play with them because he likes 54 THAT BOY OF YOURS them. The dramatic expression of himself in play is normal. He acts the part of another with un- conscious success. He prefers to imitate grown-up men, especially men of might and dar- ing. Without hesitation, he takes the part of a soldier, even at that early day, though not lacking in valorous discretion. "When Pm a man I'm going to be a soldier, Mother," said Tommie. "What, and be killed by the enemy?" she asked. "Oh, well, I guess I'll be the enemy," was his dis- creet decision. During these years he has the same two needs, at a different stage of their growth, plenty of play and something worth imi- tating, that something a person. These six years are the period of greatest ac- tivity, due to rapid expansion of his physical life and his gradual discovery of the world into which he has come. The result of all this physical and emotional action is a set of habits and they will be good habits, if he is fortunate in his family and friends. Third Early Childhood, from six to about nine. He has just finished the period of the great- est physical activity of his whole life and is at the absorptive period. He absorbs food and love and ideas. Play gets to be team work, be- cause he is nearing the social era. Conscience becomes more self-acting and he wants to be his own keeper. Imagination has been at work all the time, creative imagination, seeing things that are yet to be and building a dream life for himself. As HIS ILLS AND EPOCHS 55 well as I can remember, from my own experience, and can judge from a certain boy whom I know quite well, I think the image-making power comes on the field of action in infancy and becomes very active in the period we are now considering. Mem- ory starts on its most active career at ten. By the time he reaches the next crisis he will be ready for it, provided he has plenty of wholesome food, frolic and fun, is not embittered by mistreatment, or confused by wrong teaching; and, also, pro- vided he has been made to see that the bad in him- self is to be condemned and repudiated as if it were in someone else. Make him play according to rule, let him not hear nor see anything that his imagination may use in the construction of an un- chaste or selfish picture. Keep the memory free from the material that will produce bitterness. Fourth Later Childhood, from nine to twelve. That is the time when his perceptions are keenest. He likes to get away from the house. Play be- comes team work. The image-making power is very active then. It is what may be called the visual imagination. He needs stories, but needs contact with nature more than he needs stories. Dr. Hall truly says that " our urbanised, hot-house life tends to ripen everything before its time." We must give him room, out-doors and in-doors. Motor exercise is what he needs, regular, active and under good control. He needs a higher au- thority over him, definite and positive, authority and not argument. Plenty of hearty play, clean 56 THAT BOY OF YOUES fun and a good ideal living before him will make this a good epoch. Fifth Early Adolescence, from twelve to six- teen. The social nature awakes, he becomes con- scious of relationships. Hidden powers and pro- pensities come into his consciousness; will power and judgment get into action together. Latent impulses are released. Eeligious feelings become acute. It is the beginning of the sex life, in its ultimate stages. His physical growth corre- sponds to the growth in his mental and moral na- ture. His expansion is by a series of explosions that seem to have no connection with each other. The social instincts are not only awake, but they express themselves in ways that surprise him, as well as others. When a new power is released it comes with a phiz and a bang. He is apt to throw up the bony framework and then build in, as they do in building a sky-scraper. He grows by jerks. He goes off on a summer visit and comes back a man. Eobert Burdette, re- turning home from a trip in company with his son, said the cars ran so slowly he was afraid the boy would be grown before he could get him home. He is arming himself for the fray, at twelve and thirteen acquiring new strength in back, leg, hip, shoulder, jaw, skull and thorax. He is vivacious. His nerves are unstable. He is awkward, because the bones have outgrown the muscles and the latter have not got them under control. Nutrition may be defective and HIS ILLS AND EPOCHS 57 cause bad health and a bad disposition. He does not know how to express himself. He hun- gers for love and appreciation, but doesn't know how to receive it. He gets out of himself toward others. His intellect becomes inquisitive; he is becoming a member of the race. He begins to wonder if he will ever have a moustache and he shaves and scrapes for it. He aspires to sing bass. He begins to think that perhaps, after all, girls are not a nuisance. He does team work at play. He uses slang. Through these stages he appreciates all the kindly attention you can show him. You can draw him by his heart strings when you can't draw him by a halter; you can lead him by his conscience better than by the collar. The hand of love can guide the new wild impulses that have come into action, impulses which, unguided, may sweep him a wreck upon the rocks. His self-consciousness is more or less confused. It is the time when he is neither a boy nor a man ; he is an anomaly. He has come to the place where, as if he were a cable car, Nature says, "Let go" and again "Take hold," but he holds on when he should "let go" and loses his hold intermit- tently, when he should "take hold," firmly. His hands know no repose, because he is not accus- tomed to so much of them. His voice can croak like a frog, chirp like a cricket and sing like an angel, all in the same breath. One minute it goes rumbling down into the depths of the earth as a bass, the next it goes up clear out of sight as a 58 THAT BOY OF YOUKS tenor. And when lie smiles he seems to be trying to work np some fresh cuticle that has grown upon his face since the day before; if he succeeds in working it all up he doesn't know what to do with it; he looks as if he would like to swallow the thing. But it is a fetching smile; you always smile back at him and you are apt to say, in after days, "His bright smile haunts me still." He is not an unalloyed comfort to the home ; and I am informed, on good authority, there was a time like that, in our home, some years ago. He talks through his nose, he wears out his pants, just exactly where you don't want him to wear them out. If his older sister is engaged to be mar- ried, he keeps her in a state of pectoral pertur- bation. That may partially explain the antipathy which a friend of mine says one of his grandfathers had for him when he was a boy. His Grandfather Stone loved Fred and thought he was the greatest thing that ever happened, and when the lad came to see him gave him the freedom of the farm. His Grandfather Brooks thought Fred was an inex- cusable impertinence and when the lad came out to the farm, put all kinds of limitations on his goings wouldn't even allow him to climb up in the apple tree and eat green apples, in the leafy month of June. Think of it! Fred says, "They were both good men, have both died and have gone to heaven and when the time comes for me to go, too, one of the first persons I shall want to see is Grandfather HIS ILLS AND EPOCHS 59 Stone; but, if Grandfather Brooks ever sees me, he'll simply have to hunt me up." At this curious stage all inharmonious and evil elements seem to battle for his possession; you wonder whether he is to become a savage or a seer, a bandit or a knight-errant, called to gallant endeavour, in behalf of the unfortunate. Sixth Maturing Adolescence, from sixteen on. The brain is full grown. Intellect takes control. Emotions are restless. Doubts of all kinds have their day. He perceives personal relations and they are becoming fixed. After each upheaval, life becomes more related and reliable. He has a saving hold on everybody's sympathy. He needs a friend who has had a similar experience and has not forgotten it, and that friend ought to be his father. To be his boy's friend is that father's main business in life, just at that time. He must relate his boy's explosions to each other and to the main purposes and interests of life, be worthy of his completest confidence and, instead of giv- ing him lectures on how to do, give him a life that does it. IX HIS SPOBTS HE is a prodigious toiler at play. As a toiler he is also at times a terror. Davie lived, as a lad, in southern California. One time his father sent him to spend a while with the lad's uncle in north- ern California, because, down there, they were ex- pecting an unexpected visit to use a Hibernicism from an earthquake and wanted the most pre- cious things out of the reach of harm. The next week came a telegram from uncle saying : ' * Come and get your boy and send me the earthquake. " And yet he was just playing. It was pure fun, not a bit of meanness in it. In truth, his sports are the most serious things in his early life ; the fun- nier and louder they are the more serious. They rank with the solemnities and, if they are at all what they ought to be, their value is beyond calcu- lation. A boy's sports are different from a girl's or a man's. The one thing he must have, from his early days till he is permanently settled in life, is play and then more play. Many men get unset- tled again for lack of the playful, in one form or another. Physically, he is adapted to sport and devel- 60 HIS SPOETS 61 oped by it. His growing muscles and bones and his unstable nervous system require play. He has several million neurons already and each one is jumping all of them in different directions. " Can't you keep still?" asks the impatient mother, when she ought to know that he cannot. He is manufacturing energy so fast it must be taken care of and play is the very way nature has de- vised for that. Play gives each muscle and neu- ron a chance, and trains them all to work together. Nature tells him to turn everything into play, and he is always glad to do anything that can be thrown into that form of activity. It does not always mean fun. It may be dramatic and entirely seri- ous; but still it is play. No boy can pass by an automobile when its owner is absent, without squeezing the honk bulb. It is the ever active spirit of sport that prompts it. The noise with which he conducts his sports has the same element of value. If boys had to play without noise they would die of tuberculosis. The lion roars when he is hungry ; so does a boy. But the boy has the lion beaten, for he yells in sheer good humour, as the birds sing. The noise is no more disorderly or unnatural than the hum of ma- chinery manufacturing gum-shoes. The loudness of his activities is wholesome. The neurons in his lungs need exercise as well as those in his legs. It is not for a moment claimed by him, or by any one of his anxious friends, that play is not hard work. Digging post holes, or worming to- 62 THAT BOY OF YOUES bacco, or carrying a hod, or feeding a threshing machine, or driving oxen, or selling goods from a bargain counter, is light and lithesome work as compared with the labour of a lad at play. That is where most of the fun comes from. If he could be induced to put that amount of physical activity and mental absorption and emotional rapture and undefiled conscience into some well-planned enter- prise he could achieve wonders and make fortunes. But there would be no fun in that, and, besides, it would require him to give up his job of being a boy. His growing muscles and bones and his unstable nerves give us the only form of perpetual motion that students of mechanics can, as yet, point to with confidence. Play is the particular outlet that nature arranged for in advance; and in order to make sure that he would utilise it, he was given the play instinct, self-operative and irrepressible, so that it is play or perish. We can easily see, then, that the more work required in play the more nature is succeeding with her fine scheme of giv- ing his energies plenty to do, and the boy gets all the benefit of it. Going fishing is no sinecure, what with cutting poles and digging bait and climb- ing over banks and wading into the water at criti- cal moments and carrying home the heavy catch of colds and explanations. Mowing the yard is nothing to it, but that is undisguised work. If, as has been said, going to school and work generally are the prose of his life and play is its HIS SPORTS 63 poetry, play with his own crowd is the dramatic poetry, play with his opponents the epic and play with his sweetheart is the lyric. But perhaps he is not interested in this analysis. With his 5,000,- 000 cells all jumping he is finding poetry in explor- ing woods and caves, digging for hidden treasure, living a few days in a tent, going nutting, climb- ing trees in order to survey the country and to hasten the coming of new trousers, collecting speci- mens, coasting, skating and playing the regulation games. There is a fine poetic touch in the way he makes preparations for play and when that is done at inappropriate times and places it is often as good as the play itself. Yet the chief value of play is not physical; it is mental and ethical and social and emotional. It shows what is in a boy ; helps to correct him ; then discovers great truths and principles to him. Froebel says : ' i The plays of children are germi- nal leaves of all later life." A newspaper re- ported the case of a boy sent to the penitentiary at sixteen, and added, "He might have been saved rom that career if he had been helped in his play. ' ' "Because he had no play ground " can be truly given as the explanation of many a life of crime. He expresses all of himself in play. The psy- chical as well as physical seeks that form of ex- pression. His emotions are first manifested in food-getting; next in play. His whole mind gets into it. Imitation and imagination; reason and religion ; love and hate ; courage and comradeship 64 THAT BOY OF YOUES all are there. From seven to thirteen he learns to co-ordinate motion and emotion. He learns law, not alone the laws of the game, but the great law of cause and effect. He learns, perforce, to respect the rights of others. Team work establishes social fellowship. He learns to accept defeat cheerfully and get ready for the next opportunity. A young man decided he wanted to go to Princeton when he saw the victorious way the college eleven accepted defeat at the hands of the Yale football team. Defeats are turned into achievements and ob- stacles into opportunities, by such a spirit. The skill which the game requires he always acquires, training all his powers to help each other like soldiers in a well-drilled army. Here, then, are three great qualities disciplined by his sports fairness, pluck and skill. Into the gaining of them go self-control, especially the control of the temper, defiance of temptation, the altruistic sen- timents of comradeship, self-confidence, and obedience to authoritative leadership. Play may be artistic in itself and may promote the various art aptitudes of boys; music, clay- moulding, building snow men, houses and fortifi- cations, playing warfare all have their construct- ive value. Play develops his muscles first; next, his skill; from twelve on, it trains the will power and the social sentiments. Nature has graded the school just right. As the spirit of comradeship rises in HIS SPORTS 65 him, he enjoys his fellow players as well as the play itself, sometimes more. Both play and talk are natural and pleasing to him, while work and conversation are artificial and irksome. Skill in both has to be acquired and sometimes he never succeeds in completely mastering them. But he learns them both easily and eagerly when they can be put into the form of play. Most boyhood tasks can be dramatised. Trimming the lawn or cutting wood, or carrying in coal, can be made competitive and thereby play- ful. History can be dramatised, especially where it involves war and heroic adventure. Imperson- ating Indians, or any other attractive characters, is always a pleasure to him. He can like what he can play. He plays teacher, doctor, preacher, cowboy, robber, stage-driver, with great success. Apparently he is learning mostly how to wrangle and yell and charge his opponents with being unfair, and is cultivating a narrow, class spirit, as fast as possible. But something very encouraging is going on. He is learning loyalty, not to himself alone, but to his cause, and each year his cause is growing larger, till, by and by, he will identify himself with the cause of man as such, and he will be loyal. Obedience to the laws of the game is embryo obedience to the laws of the state and the laws of life. It is even claimed that the aesthetic and artistic sense is developed in play. Play is constructive unless it is brutal. Progress is sometimes an anti- 66 THAT BOY OF YOUES climax quarterback, halfback, fullback, hunch- back, the latter for life. But grace and rhythm of motion, balance and proportion of schemes, cour- tesy and kindness in team work these can grow out of well-played games. In these games, con- structed for the times, he is growing out of the crude into the arts of civilisation. Luther Gulick says that children seldom play games spontaneously before they are seven, their sports being under leaders ; from seven to twelve each is for himself and against the rest; after that, it is team work and out of doors. "The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-con- trol, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm." To his parents or guardians : 1. Co-operate with nature in letting him play all he can and co-operate with him in the play itself, so far as possible. 1 2. Give the play instinct expression in sports that develop cleanness, comradeship, courage and conscience. 3. Turn the play into service, by turning service into play. 4. Find his special aptitudes and let him follow that line toward his vocation. See that the plays are increasingly intellectual and social. We are developing a large number of winter sports. There is room for originality in the development of plays, especially in the home and for the win- ter evenings. HIS SPOETS 67 A closing word must be said about the responsi- bility of the public, especially in the cities, in pro- viding suitable playgrounds for children and carefully supervising them. It is the best pre- ventative of crime, next to the public schools, the city can use. Plays should no more be commer- cialised than home or religion or schools. It is a good preventive of casualties. We have statis- tics and reason for the assertion that public bath- ing beaches and playgrounds decrease death by, accident. This does not relieve the home of a similar responsibility. Parlour furniture and costly dishes can never serve as good a purpose as some apparatus or arrangement for physical culture and play; nor can any of these be so val- uable as life on a farm. Jane Addams says the stupid experiment of organising and failing to organise play brings fine revenge of injury to the civic and personal life, while well-directed play is a development in both directions. HIS EMPLOYMENTS His sports form one kind of exercise, but they are not just the kind of employment I have in mind. Some of his employments he turns into sports, some of the time; but usually they are work, nothing but work. There are three reasons why he must have em- ployment, both regular and special. One is that he gets discipline by it; in industry, in skill by the adaptation of means to ends, in forethought, in continuity and in self-mastery. Again, that is the way he is getting ready for his career, for those are the very qualities he must have when he gets out into his life work; and he must get them started as habits, at the habit-making time of his life. Two things will always be required of him character and efficiency; and he is get- ting a large part of them by means of his work. The third reason is that his services are indis- pensable to others, especially in the home, even though his parents are rich enough to hire every- thing they want done. A servant cannot put the spirit of a son into his work. A child can be a partner. Yet the work he does is more important to him than to all the rest of the family. 68 HIS EMPLOYMENTS 69 We should distinguish two groups of employ- ments those that are assigned to him by his eld- ers and those that he initiates and carries on himself; both are valuable beyond the power of definitions to express. Hardships and obstacles are a distinct advan- tage to him. Two mistakes are often made. On the one hand so much may be done for him and so little done through him and in partnership with him that he may grow up without any sense of responsibility to anybody for anything; on the other hand, so little interest may be taken in what he is compelled to do that his work may seem en- tirely unrelated to his own interests. In most of our modern homes there seems very little left for a boy to do. The chores are done by machinery. Happy for him if he can bring in the kindling, or fuel, or start the fire, or take care of the furnace, or carry out ashes. If there are no sisters in the home to make the beds and sweep the floor and set the table and wash the dishes, he can take over those jobs, although they are not exactly in his line. Also happy for him, if he can take care of the lawn and help in the garden. The manual training school opens up possibilities in the line of artisanship and there he can follow his aptitudes. And speaking of manual training, let us not forget the part that manual labour has in human life. The hand shows the abysmal difference between human and ani- mal life. Dr. G. Stanley Hall says he found in 70 THAT BOY OF YOUES the United States census reports between three and four hundred occupations, more than half of which require manual labour. Each tool develops its own kind of skill and symmetry. Pestalozzi was right in saying, "No knowledge without skill." Perhaps the boy can assist his father on the typewriter, or with his books, or in the office. Of course, if he lives in the country, where every boy ought to be brought up, he has limitless oppor- tunities for regular employment. He can feed the cows and drive them up and milk them, and work in the garden, and plough and help put in the crop and harvest it. His tasks may be varied with playing and hunting and fishing and going to the store and to the neighbours on errands. The horseback work on the farm always suits his tastes and talents. He can turn the grindstone and salt the cows and wait on everybody who feels the need of his humble services, from his parents and older broth- ers and sisters to the servant girl and the hired hand. One boy I have heard of didn't want to go to the country because he heard they had thrash- ing machines there and it was hard enough for him when the thrashing was done by hand. Three characteristics of his work are essential. It must be regular and definite. Even if it is a medley of disconnected chores, each must have its own place in the day's schedule, that he may grow in the virtues of system and order. HIS EMPLOYMENTS 71 His work must also be congenial, as far as it is possible to make it so. His aptitudes are to be studied and considered. We know how much de- pends on that. As far as it can be made so, his work should be in the lines of his future calling and career. Handel's father wanted to make a lawyer of him and would not allow him to do some things that his tastes and his talents fitted him to do. Michael Angelo's father wanted to put him in a government position. They tried to keep Watt from watching the tea kettle boil and to make him do practical things. He was willing to help around the house, if they would only allow him to study the steaming kettle part of the time. While the ideal of all work is that it shall be so congenial that one will always delight in it, some- times it is sure to become irksome. Those for whom he works, or the aim he has in working, must so excite his interest that he is glad to do even disagreeable things. And even then he is not an angel. To some extent his work ought to have material remuneration. Often he wants no more than the pleasure of helping and the appreciation he de- serves. Those two rewards must never fail to come. If there is no form of interest he can take in his work, it will become only eye-service. He will be at cross purposes with duty. Co-operative partnership is most congenial to him. It appeals to his self-respect, enlightens him about values 72 THAT BOY OF YOURS and needs, and gives him an unselfish interest in others besides himself. It is of the highest importance that he receive some of the rewards in order to gratify and train his sense of ownership and responsibility, to sat- isfy his sense of right and to secure the uncoerced co-operation of his will. The sharing may be in indirect ways. Even if his part goes back into the common fund for the support of the family, he is usually willing, provided he can have the pleasure of being in the combine, and can retain his sense of freedom. His ownership of his earnings is to be recog- nised, even though he is not to be left without in- structions as to the way he should handle them. Habits of thrift must be taught both in the work done and in the care taken of his possessions. The other group of enterprises is what he initi- ates, himself, though often with the assistance of other boys. The boy who is not given encourage- ment to try his talents in that way is denied his birthright. To be sure his first business transactions are chiefly aerial and he deals in atmospheric values of a very warm temperature. He seldom becomes what, at first, he wants to become, for lie can't get all his arrangements made for that till he has tried something else for awhile, and while he is doing that, he forgets what it was he wanted to become. He is almost certain to want to be a street car conductor, or a circus rider, or a pony express- HIS EMPLOYMENTS 73 man, or a pot hunter, or a whale catcher, or an insect catcher for the Smithsonian, or a gold hun- ter, or a soldier. He is not especially brave, in fact, is seldom so; but he likes the banners and the buttons and the stripes and the guns, for the pomp and the appearance of it all. Incidentally, he would not mind being a taxidermist, or a dog fancier, or a cowboy. He is certain to be stage- struck, at an early day. I was, but it was a four horse stage, that struck my admiration. Gather- ing and selling berries, peddling apples, running on errands for a store these are his common- place employments. The amount of enjoyment a boy gets out of the enterprises he initiates himself is a wholesome education; it is an anticipation of his career and a preparation for it. He must be encouraged to do this, and carefully guided. Guidance is highly necessary. When my cousin and I gathered the apples that would, otherwise, have gone to waste in his father's orchard, and took them down to Petersburg and sold some of them and gave one half of the gross receipts to the owner of the orchard and divided the other half between us, it was fine business. But the business reached its most fascinating point after we had peddled all we could and then would throw them out to the crowds of boys to see them scramble and eat. And they were gifted at both scrambling and eat- ing. The decline of the lightning rod also opened to me a little activity which I shall always re- 74 THAT BOY OF YOURS member with pleasure. The old rods on the house came down and were turned over to me, together with some that once decorated a previous resi- dence, and I sold them for a pretty good price to Mr. Wooley, down at the blacksmith shop. The pleasure of taking that money out of my pocket and counting it at least a dozen times a day is a sweet memory, even yet. Even employment with hobbies is a benefit, as it develops special tastes and, sometimes, fits for special work in the future. If no other good comes from them they are, at least, employments, and that is something; but the memory of them is sure to be a source of recreative amusement to him, in the future. One boy of my acquaintance went into the white rabbit industry and actually paid expenses, while getting back large returns of pleasure and information and sympathy with ani- mal life. Another went into photography, while a little group, near by, studied wireless telegraphy. Drawing, ceramic work, sketching, music vocal and instrumental have given boys lots of pleas- ure and profit. Another makes it pay to raise pigs; another, a certain breed of dogs; still an- other boy makes a specialty of pigeons. There is an enterprising lad who raises vegetables in the back yard, on shares, and he sells his half for enough to take music lessons on the flute. Boys' organisations gangs and clubs and troops may be given employment by the public and by individ- uals. That kind of organisation does double good. HIS EMPLOYMENTS 75 But the note of warning must be sounded. Perils await him. Among his interesting ventures are those in which his father engages to give him financial compensation for services of greater or less insignificance. Let both him and his father beware lest he learn to put a financial value on those ministries which he should render freely and gladly, as a son. Let him learn to co-operate for the pleasure of doing his part. Let every com- mand given him be a summons to his nobler sense of comradeship, all work come to be team work and all rewards be a gratification to his unselfish- ness. He is in peril of early pessimism, as he finds that everybody feels competent to direct him and justified in imposing on him by withholding or cutting his wages, working him overtime, and, in numberless ways, failing to recognise that a boy can get tired, or hungry, or irritated, or indignant. But worse than that, the employed boy is in dan- ger of hearing profane and obscene talk, and that, too, from men whose consciences should blister them for the infamy. The man who pours filth and profanity into a boy's ear is worthy of severe retribution. Yet, at the noon hour and in the office, that boy may hear words which make him blush and he is often invited to do things that he knows his parents would rather see him die than do. He may be so directed that his early ventures will be in the line of his future achievements. It 76 THAT BOY OF YOURS is well for him to have in mind such boys as An- drew Carnegie who came over from Scotland with only a sovereign in his pockets but with sov- ereignty in his soul, and fired a stationary engine for two fifty a week. A boy can get the virtues of industry, honesty, fairness and altruism started and operative in his life quite early. HIS POSSESSIONS IF ownership of something is essential for a man, it is for a boy, as well. It is necessary for a man because God has put him in the midst of things that are to be owned, has given him a de- sire for possession and has distinctly told him to subdue and use them. And whenever we find a man who has lost all desire for such things, he does not take the right kind of interest in them, nor feel responsibility, nor get the discipline he might through his effort to possess them, unless he has some special mission in the world, providen- tially appointed, which prevents acquisition of property. So a boy must begin to have things of his own, for he needs training in that, as well as in his memory and reasoning and powers of speech. Through his memory he owns much ; through lay- ing up something, he is providing for the future and increasing his present enjoyments and oppor- tunities. One can own only what he can know and use. The vagrant has nothing to enjoy ; the very rich own very little of what they have, because they cannot enter into it, just as a man can have 77 78 THAT BOY OF YOUES great supplies of food, but can assimilate only one meal at a time. A boy must gratify that desire, secure that dis- cipline and feel that responsibility, by owning, and caring for, and managing something in the line of possessions. He must have his own toys, books, clothes and articles of usefulness. His pockets show his passion for possession, a blind desire, working without the power of selection, and the result is an aggregation of things entirely useless, except to a boy knife, tops, marbles, bean-shoot- ers, beeswax, bullets, buckles, lead, scrap iron, slings, fishing worms, chewing gum, licorice, candy, pills. There is an age when he is more active in such enterprises, but he is doing the same thing he does when he amasses wealth. He has a trading age, from about eleven to fifteen, when he will trade anything he has for anything any other boy has cats and dogs and pigeons and toys and any of the stock he carries in his pockets. He must not only possess things, but take care of them as well. The penalty for not having what he can call his own is that he never has anything to give to others, is thriftless, selfish, begging, bor- rowing and tempted to steal what he would like to have. Possessions mean power and thrift is prep- aration for peace. He cannot take care of his own things unless he has a place for them which is his own. That is one of the reasons why a boy should have a room, a trunk and all the equip- ment with which to take care of his things. That HIS POSSESSIONS 79 is not the only reason be should have a separate room, but that alone is enough. What has been said about all of this applies es- pecially to his money. As he is expected to make money and possess it and use it in the future, he must begin as a boy, and learn to do it in the right way, so as to avoid the wrong way later. The very same principles that he is to observe then are to be acted upon now, both because they are right and because he will not act on them as a man, unless he learns to act on them now. How is a boy to get money? That is a matter of far- reaching importance. He may properly get it in two ways receive it as a gift and earn it. Both ways are necessary. It should come in the form of an allowance, given freely and regularly. If he has to tease and beg for it, he gets no training, finds no law of cause and effect and of parental forethought, gains no sentiment of partnership with parents. If it does not come regularly, in a dependable way, he may be tempted to get it in a way that is not honest. His conscience does not awake as early as his desire for possessions. There may be objections to the allowance, as there are objections to every way of doing any- thing. There is the danger that he will come to think of it as his by right, and not as a gift ; and he may grow up to lack appreciation of what is done for him. But there are always dangers in good things, and it is not impossible to safeguard him. '80 THAT BOY OF YOURS It must be given in such a way as to keep him responsible to his parents. As it comes regularly it cultivates in him order and system. A pocket- book to keep it in ministers to his pleasure, makes him orderly and enables him to save it more easily. An account book in which to set down receipts and expenditures trains him in the virtue of accuracy. Reports to his father each week keep alive the sense of responsibility to authority, even for his own things. Requiring him to save a part of each week's allowance enables him to accumulate and encourages thrift. A small reward for additional savings will still further teach him the value of money. A rigid refusal to allow him to spend it in injurious ways may prevent spendthrift habits. Putting a portion of it into a savings bank that will pay him interest gives him an idea of busi- ness. Meeting some of his personal expenses with his own money will teach him forethought and self- denial. Making some of his own purchases will teach him good judgment and self-reliance. By the time he is his own man he will have money on hand and he will have learned self-denial and economy and forethought and patience. As soon as he is able to invest his savings in property of some kind which will require his care or executive skill, he begins to become manly, with a sense of responsibility and a wholesome valua- tion of himself. xn HIS SPARE TIME A BOY has very little spare time, if he is left to arrange his own schedule. In fact, he will not find time for everything he wants to dp. And he certainly will not have time if he does everything he is asked to do. But if a reasonable schedule is worked out for him, he will have enough time on his hands to follow his own bent and look after some of his urgent interests. He will be left to his own resources a while each day. That is the spare time of which I am especially speaking. After awhile he will be in charge of twenty-four hours each day, and he is now getting ready for that responsibility, by taking over a few hours at a time. If he can be helped to make a success of them, there is reason to believe that he can succeed with the whole twenty-four, by and by. Let us take an inventory and see what he has on his hands. Count out the time arranged for him in the family schedule hours for eating and sleeping and doing the chores about the house and yard, or on the farm. Then count out the hours of school arranged for by the public. There may be a special concession of extra time for extra chores and for sleeping, for both of which he is 81 82 THAT BOY OF YOUBS very grateful. After allowing for all the time thus pre-empted, we have quite a margin left some in the morning, a little at noon, more at the close of school, still more after the evening meal ; and he is to be allowed large liberty in the use of it. Part of his own time is apt to arrange for itself, as he and the other boys drift into their plans for play, and no one knows just how it is done. They gravitate together at certain times and places as naturally as blackbirds flock together in the autumn. It is the group that does it, rather than any one boy in the group; it is a composite choice, even though suggestions come from indi- viduals here and there. But I am speaking of the time that is left to his own initiative, when he is out of school and through with his group plays and his chores, es- pecially at the evening hour. Let us say he has three hours, more or less each day, which he can call his own, exclusive of the Sundays. That would make eighteen hours in six days. In one year it would make a great big slice of time for which he is more or less responsible. He has no time to throw away, but he has enough for very large achievements and it is better than if it were all crowded together. The fact must be faced, that, as he grows older, it is the most perilous time of the whole twenty- four hours for three reasons. It is the time of the day when temptation to all the forms of dis- HIS SPARE TIME 83 sipation is most bold and brazen and persistent; it finds him more relaxed and less on his guard especially in the evening than at any other time of the day. It is the only time that he can call his very own and, in the mere deciding, it gives a new responsibility which reacts on his whole nature. He shows what it is to him, not so much by the way he does the tasks prescribed by another as by the way he prescribes his own tasks. If he is taught to use it rightly as a boy, his destiny is secure. He cannot be coerced, but the possibilities may be opened to him in a fascinating way by a recital of historic examples. Elihu Burritt, the blacksmith, became a learned linguist while working at the forge, as did William Carey while working as a cobbler and later as a mis- sionary. Sir John Lubbock was a banker, but he found time at odd moments to become a great archeologist ; E. C. Stedman became a man of let- ters, though a banker; Mr. Westcott, the banker, wrote " David Harum" at odd moments. John Locke, the philosopher, did most of his work which is of permanent value, while resting from his daily toil. Our own Benjamin Franklin used to take a book to the table with him, when he was intent on some special scientific point. Hugh Miller be- came a learned geologist while pursuing his trade as a stone mason. But the list is too long to give. These are eminent examples but not too eminent to be useful. Some of the spare time can be spent in play, es- 84 THAT BOY OF YOUES pecially in the twilight when he and the other boys get together on the lawn, or in the vacant lot across the street, for a wholesome game. The long winter evenings give rare opportunities for a variety of things. Instructive play is one of the best things for him and the other members of the family. The play may be dramatic with a simple attempt to portray the characters of a book. Or the time may be given to alternate read- ing in which each one takes a character. For- tunate for him if the older members of the family are playful as well as serious in their feelings, and know how to give direction to the evening's enjoyments in the form of sympathetic and sen- sible advice and co-operation. He is always open to that kind of help, for it trains instead of de- nying his power of choice to him. The right of tactful supervision over all his time must never be surrendered. When the games and readings are social they develop his sense of social responsibility and train him in the virtue of sympathy. The more he can do for the benefit of others the more he gets out of it. If he is fortunate enough to be one of several children, he will come to think of the mu- tual interests promoted by this use of his spare time with more pleasure than of any other feature of it. This will be increasingly the case after he reaches his teens. The evening's programme must not be exhaust- HIS SPAEE TIME 85 ing and must not be so exciting as to make him dream of being tomahawked or chased by tigers. Nor must he be allowed to think he is being driven into a grown-people's programme. This will take time. But I don't know any first-class boy who is not worth time and all the time there is. It will take a great deal of ingenious forethought and planning and arranging, but if there is any boy worth doing it for it is your boy. There are other things besides play that he can do in his spare hours. It is a good time for him to ride his hobby if he has one, and if he has not one it is a good time for him to hunt one up. His dominant taste will show itself enough for a wise pair of parents to help him find the very one he needs. So many things in science and mechanics are now brought within the comprehension of chil- dren that it will be easy to interest him in some- thing that may prove of value to him all the rest of his life. He is fortunate if he has a strong taste for music and can give some of his evenings to that. One thing more, and of vast moment : He must be taught to minister in an unselfish way to the needy, and some of his own time ought to be spent that way. If spare moments are the gold dust of time for men, they are for boys as well. If men ought to practise active benevolence, they can not learn to do it well unless they begin when they are boys. 86 THAT BOY OF YOUKS Through Sunday-school and social tions good methods will be suggested for far- reaching ministries to his fellow beings. This will not only be a discipline of essential importance, but a delight of the highest kind. XIII HIS LOOKS A BOY is not always a thing of beauty not yet. The "irrepressible conflict/' of which we have read and said so much, is the conflict between his desire to look well and his disinclination to use the measures that tend to insure good looks. A presentable appearance is impossible without cleanliness, and from that standpoint boys drop into three classes. First are the few, the precious few, who like to use soap and water and scrubbing implements on ordinary as well as on state occasions ; but it must be conceded that this is almost an invisible, rather than an invincible, company of "Knights of the Bath." The second group must always have high pres- sure inducements to avail themselves of bathroom facilities. The third is the great middle class of boys, who, with more or less reluctance, will co-operate in the care of their persons. It will be different later on, but then they will no longer be boys. Meantime the boy's face, hands, finger-nails, neck and ears are negligible quantities. There is a time when almost any little boy is pretty, if cleaned up and 87 88 THAT BOY OF YOUES dressed tastefully, and he enjoys being told he is pretty; but has no more respect for his looks than to play in a mud puddle, if he has a chance and is not watched. Those who have the care of him find that his looks are an element in the boy problem, and his looks are, in some degree, a matter of clothes. I think we are getting away from the good old days when the laws of heredity had charge of the boy's clothing department. The second-hand dealer, the weary tramp, and the frontier missionary, with his seven closely graded boys, have come to his aid in relieving him of some of those heirlooms to which he used to be the sole heir apparent. Still there is a boy here and there living under the old dispensation, and there are men in abun- dance who once lived the life of pensioners on the bounty of preceding generations. Two boys were engaged in conversation and one of them said: "My daddy has some new teeth that the dentist made him." With significant promptness his chum asked, "What is he going to do with his old ones?" "Oh, I don't know," was the reply; "I suppose they'll cut 'em down and make me wear 'em." There comes a time when, even with the best of clothes, it is difficult to secure the co-operation of his looks in making a desirable impression. He would like to be graceful but he can't be. Joseph Parker says that when Gladstone smiled it looked like sunshine breaking over a crag; but even Glad- HIS LOOKS 89 stone was not credited with that achievement at the age of fourteen. To speak after the manner of the scientist, we say that his bones have grown faster than his muscles and his mind in its appre- ciation of ideal things, of action and form faster than either; therefore he cannot handle his mus- cles as gracefully as he will do later on. With an acuter sense of what he wants to do and less skill than is required, he suffers confusion and mortifi- cation which makes him still more clumsy. He belongs to the awkward squad. He is starting to look up. He has been living in his imagination and he is taking that same power over into another department of the real. He sees a disparity be- tween the real and the unreal, especially the phys- ical real, and he is clumsy and awkward, moody and sometimes melancholy. It is true, yet a paradox, that he is at his most forbidding and fascinating period at one and the same time, and his looks betray him in both re- spects. Conceit and humiliation, love and dislike are struggling within him. He likes his looks and dislikes them. He wants different features, or feet, or hands, but he hopes he is really not homely. There is a moral value in his looks because they react on his disposition and his tendencies; and they affect his relations with people whether it is desirable they should or not. For that reason there is a moral value in clothes ; and it is inter- esting to see him awake to their significance when that new world in which are all the deathless in- 90 THAT BOY OF YOURS terests of the heart, opens to him. They are in- volved in the appearance he makes. Now he de- liberately washes behind his ears, shines the heels of his shoes even when in a great hurry; finds that a mirror is an indispensable article of furniture for his room, gives careful attention to the parting of his hair, combs it all the way back, feels humili- ated at any little patch on his trousers that is in view of his own eyes, and actually blushes at the thought of patches around on the other side of him which others can see though he may not. Those who were children so long ago that they treat the whole matter in a cavalier way and say: "It is not your clothes, my son, that count but you ; pretty is as pretty does," may be right but they are just as wrong as they are right for it is only half the truth. When there comes a new con- sciousness of self there arises a new demand for clothes. The new sense of others requires that he present himself to them in a satisfactory way. A new pride in his own family calls for suitable clothes. There are two ways to treat his clothes instinct fight it and bring on a conflict, or correct and cultivate it and teach him to do the same. His features must remain, as a rule, as nature made them to grow, but they may be helped out with clothes, cleanliness, appropriate decorations and the right kind of foods and scientific culture, till they reshape themselves and assume manly beauty, especially when there is a noble and beau- HIS LOOKS 91 tiful soul residing in the body and using it for high purposes. Culture in good looks is one of the rights of a boy, in order to offset any present disadvantage and equip him for future effectiveness. And it can be carried on only with his co-operation. But therein lies a peril. His vanity, curious thing, is capable of puffing him up with conceit and pulling him down with dissatisfaction. To work for good looks is not bad as a means of self-expression, but it is fatal as an end in itself. He will need both advice and direction, but they will be most effect- ive when incidental. Clothes are to keep him warm, absorb or transfer impurities and react on his bearing. He must have both dress and ad- dress. Put on him clothes that do not wound his taste nor puff up his pride and he has no artificial load to carry. Teach him to dress himself, with due regard to comfort and to the sanctity of that sa- cred mystery, the body, and you have given him some of the deep lessons of life. There is a cul- ture in the art of dressing which, first of all, puts the man above millinery and then adapts the mil- linery to him with a sense of his absolute superi- ority. When the inner spirit is cultivated it transfigures the boy and gives him an impressive- ness which is without peril. Keep steadily and consciously in mind that it is the character you are cultivating, through the culture of the charm of the outer person, and the latter will be second to 92 THAT BOY OF YOUES the former. When the mind is filled with the sense of the true, the beautiful and good, it will react on the body to make it conform to the mind ; and the culture of the body will be a sacred ministry to that sacred temple both of the human and the di- vine spirit. Great homeliness may be depressing to him, while the very handsome boy is tempted to vanity. Fortunate for him if he is not so homely that he has to think about it and thereby become egoisti- cal, and is not so handsome that he becomes ego- tistical. XIV HIS GANG BOYS like the word "gang." It is the most ac- curate word we can use, anyway. Their "gang" period begins when they are about eleven, some- times earlier; it continues till thirteen and some- times to fourteen or fifteen. The social nature is unfolding in new ways and they do new things, new even to their forgetful fathers, who wonder why boys are such strange creatures, and declare they were never like them which, of course, is strictly not true. At this pe- riod, boys are compelled to get together for two reasons: First, because they are at that age; it is in their bones and is burning like fire ; the social world has opened to them and they seek their social affiliations in the line of their tastes. Sec- ond: They get together because their physical activities are such that no boy can get all the exer- cise he wants without the aid of other boys who can assist him in organising his energies into co- operative enterprises. He simply cannot bear to be left alone. Girls are not in his class. They have no charm nor terror for him not yet. They get together by neighbourhoods, as a rule, and at the call of someone who is a natural leader 93 94 THAT BOY OF YOUKS and assumes all the functions of a leader with- out appointment and without hesitation. There is no rotation in office and when the chief goes the gang is already gone; it has reached its term and expires by natural limitation and the boys have no more use for it than for their father's old clothes. "While the gang lasts it keeps busy. What they do when they get together depends on several things how old they are, what kind of a leader they have, where they hold their meetings, what sort of homes they come from and what in- fluences come from older people. If they get together just before they emerge from the preda- tory, individualistic stage, or if they have a leader of a destructive and lawless nature, or if they "hang out" in objectionable places, or if they come from homes where snarling and nagging, or indifference, prevails, or if they are left without any appreciative and directive help as a "gang" from older people, they are likely to inaugurate a torrid temperature for the community and achieve widespread and undesirable fame for themselves. But they can be gentlemen and can emerge from this period with new attainments and equipments. There are some things necessary. First of all they must do things, do them with heads and hands and hearts and feet and voices. Do not forget the ceaseless accompaniment of sound. And all of them must do things and do the same things. "All the kids do it," is the conclusive HIS GANG 95 reason for a given deed. The man who does things is their hero, whether shooting mountain lions, or riding a bucking broncho, or playing ball, or going as a heroic missionary to the heathen. Their activities, which may be entirely admis- sible, are hunting, fishing and roaming into the country; making bonfires and attending fires for, if there is one thing a boy enjoys above an- other, it is being promptly on hand at every con- flagration and remaining till the last fireman has left; participating in political parades; attending Sunday-school picnics; going on real bona fide errands, when the gang spirit is recognised in some distinctive way; engaging in any kind of well-doing, to which he is led by comradeship and not by the collar. Put special regalia on him and he will work till he drops. The above list does not begin to be complete, as every boy knows ; it is suggestive. They co-operate in collecting, for they all seem to have a collecting mania; not that they care very much for the things they collect, but it is the collecting itself they like. "We may utilise this mania and direct them into something perma- nently worth while, otherwise they will likely acquire an aggregation that would suit only a freak show. They make all sorts of social ex- periments in caves and old houses, and usually have a guardhouse for enemies and insubordi- nates. They would care very little for the fea- 96 THAT BOY OF YOURS tures that so attract them in the " Boys' Bri- gades, " and "Boy Scouts," if it were not for the crowd they can get into. They think out a nomenclature which would surprise any adult maker of dictionaries. It is an era of slang and nicknames. The leader is " Judge," or "Doc," or "Cap'n," and every boy has a new name that is far beyond the reach of a Dickens to invent. Each contributes to the com- mon freak fund. This is the era of yells and signals and whistles and shyness among stran- gers and disinclination to show affection, as such, at home or anywhere else. The boy thinks a great deal more of his teacher than she imagines and he dotes on his daddy and often brags about him, but would rather keep him in ignorance of it. They don't have to express themselves to each other, because they all feel alike and know it. Their talent for inventing and pursuing games of all kinds seems phenomenal and it is all team work. The boy has not lost his individu- ality ; he has rather increased it. But he has lost a part of his old individualism and is now a part of a brotherhood. His life is widening out from its birthpoint. Some latent qualities of which he was not aware, are being released during this period courage and loyalty to others, the spirit of co- operation and benevolence and obedience to au- thority, and the sense of reality. He learns to hate cowardice and the boy who will not "take a HIS GANG 97 dare" is read out of his class at once. That boy is a "baby," a "sissy" and "has no sand." Be- cause of loyalty and pride they will fight for their gang and help the individual members and suffer and bleed for the good of the order. Individu- ally they are not fond of fighting as a rule, but as gangsters they may enjoy it. The gang may be good or bad, may turn itself into a self-improvement club, or a band of marau- ders. Often the boys do not know which way they are drifting. If a strong and wise and lov- ing hand lays hold of them and keeps itself in- visible most of the time it may conduct them through that period and work transformations. Then when the gang is gone and the individuals remain, loyalty to a little group will be loyalty to the larger group of man as such; friendships within the group will grow into the finer friend- ships of manhood; courage in the face of per- sonal or clan peril will become that doughty strength of heart and conscience which will dare to do right anywhere and always; the sense of re- ality will be the perception of truth; obedience to the law of the clan will be reverence for the laws of man and God. The boys appreciate it if someone comes back and down to their level and gets into the gang with them, provides some place as good as a good home for them, keeps mischief from becoming malice and turns energies and impulses into en- nobling activities; goes out into the fields and 98 THAT BOY OF YOUES camps with them, into their dens and caves and laughs with them, into their meetings and yells with them. They like that sort of an older friend next to their chief. Jacob Eiis says that when his wise wife saw that their boys were in a gang she joined it herself and got control of it, though they never suspected what she was about. It is just the time to tether the boy to the biggest and best things of life. Even religion can reach him through his gang instinct. XV HIS CHUMS IT is claimed that the boy's life is an epitome of the life of the race. He passes through the two stages that the race has passed through and when he gets into the third he is there to stay, as the race now is. Some wise man has called them the stages of dependence, independence and interdependence. At first it is dependence. The boy cannot walk, or talk, or dress himself can- not even feed himself. The only thing in the world he can do is to summon assistance, but he is certainly gifted at that. He could honestly say, "This one thing I do," if he were capable of saying anything. He has been fitted out with an appliance for turning in a distress call, or a riot call, which is warranted to work at all hours, and to work exceptionally well in the darkness of the night. For several years he is in the strictly dependent state. Then there comes a period of independence, not in fact but in his feelings. He sometimes thinks he would like to run away, though in almost every instance in which the running-away cure has been tried it has completely cured the runner. From that time on, running away is not in his line. 99 100 THAT BOY OF YOUES By and by he is more or less aware of the in- terdependence stage. Two marks of childhood are enthusiastic fondness for play and compan- ionship. " Mamma, I wish I was two little pup- pies, so I could play together/' said Joe. Eight here his chum steps in. This chum is likely to drop out any day and give way to the gang. But after the gang days, chumship sets in again and has in it the elements of endurance. The first stages in the development of the boy's social relationship can easily be distin- guished. The first is the. indiscriminate and per- sonal stage, when he scarcely asks who his com- panions are, requiring only that they be boys and plenty of them, the more the better. To be sure, he has his preferences, but he has not yet specialised in a decisive and final way. During this period, he is apt to be carried by his strong team sentiment over into the realm of the oppo- site sex and fall furiously in love with some little girl. He usually does so each season, or each session of school, and he thinks he can't live with- out her. This is about the only thing in his boy- hood that he cannot turn into play. The second stage is from ten to twelve; the third, when he is twelve or thirteen; the fourth, after the gang is dissolved; the fifth is more de- liberate it is final, with complexities. So we see there are two general chumming periods, before and after the gang period, one of them fleeting and fussy, the other secretive and HIS CHUMS 10 1 stable, all connected with the awakening of the social instincts, all of them marks of that final state of interdependence. First it prompts him into a temporary alliance with some boy and he keeps away from the girls ; then he gets in with a crowd of boys, under the influence of this new impulse which leads him to take in a larger section of his fellows. The moment the girl begins to appear on his horizon, he is aware of a new phase of interde- pendence ; he drops the gang at once and wants a boy chum. Is it for protection or co-operation? The boys come out of their gang as the animals went into the ark, "two by two." In the first stage the friendship, like soda pop, comes with a bang and a fizz and they have to make the most of it while it lasts. The two use the same slang, the same yell, the same tones of voice, the same games and, seemingly, the same personality. When they have a quarrel and make up, the one who was to blame usually treats. They acquire a stock of possessions, bats and balls, dogs and cats, and when the partnership is dissolved, may act like cats and dogs in determin- ing the ownership of the property. They switch chums often enough to keep it from growing monotonous. Memory recalls the time, when, in a little country school one spring- time, Will and I would be chums for a few days, with deadly hostility towards a small crowd of three or four other boys, and a few days later 1(52 THAT BOY OF YOUES John and I would be tied up together against the field. Some way, the more you think of one boy, the more you are likely to be in rivalry with the other boys. This period soon passes. It seems a provisional and preliminary affair. But I have known boy chums continue intimate friends for life. The reason seems to be that the same two boys kept together through the gang period, and re-established their intimacy when the gang dis- solved. It is at the age of fifteen or sixteen that the main chum period opens. The clan impulse has spent its particular force and given way to an- other social impulse, really a double impulse. The boy likes his new chum better than he ever did like a boy before, and as for girls they are the newest thing in angels, just out; and usually there is some one girl who certainly must have wings attached somewhere to her airy, fairy form. The confiding instinct brings him and his chum together and the pairing instinct directs his gaze toward some adorable "she." He wants a chum because he is now growing secretive and this is the outlet for his heart. He is growing secretive, because he is the possessor of newly-awakened powers of which he has not yet gained control, and he finds that he is connected with people and affairs in a new way. He is not yet sure of him- self. His chum has made him a chum for the same reason and the two understand each other. HIS CHUMS 103 He is a new man in a new world and his chum is the same. There never was another like him since the world began. When one enters a new world it is like trying to live in a vacuum unless he finds someone there ; that one is his chum and happy for him if he finds some of the older folk lingering there. The things they talk about are the things that belong to that age sports, of course, and what they intend to become, and their plans, and girls. That great day has dawned. Some new powers are getting in command. Memory is no longer lonesome. Imagination is actively at work. The rational and deliberative faculties are in the field. Sentiment hangs halos over the outlying future. Sentiments crystallise into character very rap- idly. You look into his eyes this morning and you see your boy no more, you see a young man. His chum will put some finishing touches on his character. The mightiest influence of this period may come from that chum to blight or bless him forever. Even if they go off to different colleges, or separate for different parts of the world, they will likely cherish the chum feeling for each other all of their lives. He who deftly guides him in the selection of his chum is his benefactor. The boy must really have two chums and the other must be his father. But that is a story by itself. XVI HIS HEROES A BOY is a born hero worshipper. That is one way he earns his passage from little to much. Nature starts him out with a talent for admiring and that is coupled with the talent for imitating. The rest of the story tells itself. He grows like that upon which he keeps his admiring gaze. The first thing he admires is physical power, for the first thing he needs is physical resources. One boy when asked who was the first mari he wanted to see when he went to heaven, instantly replied, "Goliar." Goliath was the only thing big enough for him. The next after the physical is the emotional; then come the intellectual, the ethical and the religious. These are the unmis- takable stages, though he may be in all three at once. His principles are in the form of persons ; his rules are in his rulers. He never cares for truth in the abstract; he wants it in the concrete. He has his heroes from the time he starts till he is old enough to be one himself; and he is capable of it, or he could not appreciate heroism in others. Discovering and worshipping his he- roes is one of the most fascinating things he evsr 104 HIS HEROES 105 does ; and one of the most wholesome, if they are of the right kind. He is furnishing very inter- esting instruction to those who have the over- sight of his life, for he is showing what is in him, what he is capable of becoming, and how the process is already going on. You can judge a boy by the man he admires. You can gauge his possibilities at a given stage, by the things he appreciates. You can guide him in the course you want him to take by the inter- est he takes in those who are going that way. His first heroes are always men of marked physical prowess, yet they always have an influ- ence on his ethical nature, for better or worse. He is almost as apt to find bad heroes as good, unless he is given some assistance. The place of homage is to be pre-empted by his father, or his older brother, or someone near at hand, for good; and the one who holds that place has to do something and be busy at it all the time. It ought not to be difficult to keep before him ex- amples of prowess that are ethically worthy of his adoration. There are plenty of them in lit- erature; plenty in real life. To be sure he may find special fascination in the swaggering, bully- ing fellow whose talk is bestial and degrading, and against such he has to be safeguarded. One of the ecstatic moments of my early life was one Sunday morning down at old Bullitts- burg church, as a group of us boys and men were out under the trees waiting for services to 106 THAT BOY OF YOUES begin. I was only nine years old. Tom Hogan and several other young men came riding up. Tom was on a grey horse. Just as that grey horse got to the proper place he began a series of demonstrations that simply raised me to an ecstasy. He reared up on his hind legs and started to walk off like a man. Then he de- scended, touched base and repeated the act. This he did again and again. Tom acted as if he had been brought up on the horse's back; in fact there seemed a quiet sympathy between the two. When the horse at last decided to take up per- manent residence on the ground and consented to be hitched to a tree and the gallant rider joined our group, I walked around him and gazed at him as at a prodigy, and listened to him as to an or- acle. But the boy likes the highly ethical best of all, if it is in the form of noble prowess and chival- rous knight errantry, provided his tastes have not already been perverted. He comes to a time when he adores intellect, especially as it takes the form of shrewdness and skill and enables phys- ical weakness to triumph over brute force, as when "Br'er Babbit" outwits the larger and stronger animals or the meek-looking stranger suddenly overpowers the bully by his superior intellect and skill. It takes him some time to be able to see the hero in the pure intellectual worker, especially one of a certain type who prepares his precious HIS HEROES 107 manuscript on a recondite subject and, when the dog tears it up and the maid throws the scraps in the fire, merely says, "Tut! tut!" in a falsetto voice. But he likes the prowess of intellect, par- ticularly when it discovers radium, constructs steamships, writes great stories and governs peo- ple. There must be personality behind the in- tellect. He knows who is the intellectual master in any combat and knows how to admire him. There comes a time when he has reverence for the man who stands for a moral principle, or makes known truth in the face of moral or mental peril. Livingstone dying on his knees in Africa is a real hero to the boy; so is Stanley, the ex- plorer, who went to Livingstone's relief in the heart of Africa. He can appreciate Dr. Kenneth McKenzie, the brilliant young medical missionary in China, who stood up with radiant face while the mob hurled missiles at him, who said he never had such a sense of victory before, the earnest of a victory later on. It is always a fortunate thing for a boy and for his father, if the latter can satisfy his best ideals of heroism. It is worth while for that father to spend his whole life learning how. He must begin with himself before the boy is born. In fact his father's father must have begun with him before he was born, just as he now begins with his boy and prepares him to be some coming boy's hero. A subtle process of imitation is go- ing on. The boy walks like his hero, talks like 108 THAT BOY OF YOURS him, wants to go into the same business with him, is growing like him, for better or for worse. Fortunate it is if his group of heroes also in- cludes some older boy or young man. Jesus of Nazareth, the perfect One, has made it His mission on earth to fill all his aspirations and yearnings. The boy must know Him and adore Him and make it his one aim to so live as to gain His approval. Then he will grow like that One. XVII HIS SWEETHEABTS I USE the plural advisedly. They usually come in an ascending series. After one fitful fever is over it is continued in the next school term or va- cation. He can hardly remember when he first began to have sweethearts and he is almost sure to acquire the fixed habit. Now, if memory is not playing a trick on me, spells of cardiac trouble begin as early as eight and increase in vehemence till the last fatal at- tack. The "spells" are frequent and fleeting, furious and funny. Mumps and measles and whooping cough may be evaded, but sweethearts never. The former attack him only once each, and if they do not succeed in dragging him off the earth the first time, they retire from the field and leave him in full possession, sometimes with a few scars as souvenirs of the struggle. But his troubles of the heart never cease to attack him. If the first spell comes early, the next comes soon thereafter and each proclaims its presence to all the members of the household. They know precisely what ails him. The rapt and sometimes tragic air, the far-away look in his eye, the pre- 109 110 THAT BOY OF YOURS occupied manner in which he engages in conver- sation, the way he looks ashamed or elated when a certain little girl's name is mentioned all are symptoms that are not lost on the experienced onlookers. No one spell can last long, but it is frightfully exhausting while it does last. Different temperaments modify the symptoms, but they are substantially the same. The appe- tite falls off; a philosophical tendency toward ab- straction shows itself; a certain uncanny way of comparing a certain girl, once in a while, with other girls shows his state of mind. He likes to give that girl an apple, a pencil, anything ; he en- joys adjusting her skates, coasting with her or defending her in some heroic way. He feels a decided nausea, accompanied by a militant am- bition, whenever he sees another boy talking too freely with her. He has great ability in saying to himself many lofty things about her and using forms of expression that border close on the poetic for one so young, and yet he is stricken with hopeless aphasia whenever he tries to say any of those fine things to her. You yourself, if man grown, remember when the first attack came on and how severe it was. You really felt alarmed about yourself and were not sure you would ever be happy again, so mournful was the delirious pleasure and so alter- nating with pain. The constrictions around the throat and the stoppages around the heart seemed more than could be endured. "The restless, un- HIS SWEETHEARTS 111 satisfied longing" would have done credit to Longfellow's "Evangeline." Just where it hurt the most you were not always sure. You loved to write her name and yours together and mark off the corresponding letters in both, then count off those left unmated, speaking the cabalistic for- mula, * 'friendship, love, idolise, hate," and the word that fell on the last letter indicated her state of feeling toward you. It was a singular thing that when it came out right you felt you were se- cure and when it came out on the wrong word, you would not believe it, but laughed it off. It was a serious time for you, and an anxious time for the innocent bystanders. You passed through the first series with Martha and Mary and Eunice and Alice, and to your great surprise did not die a single time. It must have been toward the end of the first series that you began to make use of the episto- lary means of expression. You had seldom done more than gaze around at school and see if she was there, look over the top of your book and grin at her in your own fetching way, and use other indirect means of declaring yourself. But now you "take your pen in hand" and "write these few lines" to let her know that she is sweeter than sugar and prettier than roses and violets, taken singly or combined, in bud, bloom or in whole bouquets. You also longed for an opportunity to tell her in private just what was the matter with you. 112 THAT BOY OF YOUES You began to give your hair some attention, but it would never stay combed. You became aware for the first time in your life that your hair needed combing. Who knew when you might suddenly find yourself alone with her? And you in- tended to be ready. You knew exactly what you would say. And one afternoon, when all the boys and girls had gone and you lingered around, she came out of the door and you were with her at last. You started off with her, but felt sheep- ish and, to your great surprise, you had abso- lutely nothing to say and nothing to say it with. It had not occurred to you that you would lose tongue and head, but that is what happened. She was provokingly serene. It irritated you to think that she did not discern your intent and co-oper- ate in a purpose which she could not fail to ap- prove. "It looks like it was going to snow," you ventured, and she began to chatter about the party she and the other girls were getting up. It was already worse than a snow-storm it was a frost. Your awkwardness oppressed you all the way home, and you secretly resolved to try send- ing a letter. In that note you not only expressed the most exalted love that had, as yet, been experienced by a boy, but you distinctly declared a desire to "lick" any boy whose conduct was not just to her liking. You really wished you might whip about half a dozen boys, all on her account, like a knight- HIS SWEETHEARTS 113 errant of the brave days of old, fighting for his lady's protection or to win her smile. But your nerve failed you when you tried to hand her the note and someone near by saw your face turn a fiery hue. Then you revealed your state of mind to a small boy friend who volunteered to deliver the note and bring back a reply. But that was a grand blunder, from the standpoint of your peace. That boy handed his coat to your sister to hold for him, while he ran a race with another boy, the note dropped out of his pocket, your sister picked it up and read it and that was the begin- ning of a drop in the temperature. Fun for the whole family evolved from that accident. The note was delivered, not by the boy, but by your sister, and she brought back a similar note written by the dear girl, comparing you very favourably not only to a first-class brand of sac- charine matter, but to red roses and blue violets, and she had a rhyme in it ; all of which would have been highly creditable to her and heaven to you, if it had come in time and under other circum- stances. It was too late; the tide was going out. You tried to laugh, but it was more like the mer- riment of a mummy. You almost fainted. You felt as you did that time when you went behind a tree and experimented with an old cigar and were cured of the smoking habit before it was formed. The sudden change in your feelings toward that girl and the resentment with which 114 THAT BOY OF YOUES you viewed all creation were a study. You dis> covered that very minute, that you didn't like her anyhow. The charm was broken. You looked around and grinned just as you did years afterward when you took laughing gas at college, and suddenly "came to." You were not sorry to be free once more and to go on about your busi- ness of being a boy, which had been interrupted by this temporary delirium. During one of these attacks you began the ac- cumulation of poetry in her interest and, if you had only known it, she was gathering mementos at the same time. You remember how superior she seemed to your own sister whom another boy con- sidered the most bewitching creature that ever breathed. You may also recall how you softened into meekness and awkwardness in her presence so very unlike your usual unrestrained freedom of speech and action. But when you were about sixteen, it was most severe. It tangled itself up with school and busi- ness and chums, and seemed the final number in the last series. When it was all over, you came out with the wholesome notion that there were others, attractive and worthy, and you became all the better fitted to settle down in later years, with the one of your mature choice. Singular how a boy would rather talk with any- body else in the world about such a matter than with his father or mother unless unless they have been in the habit of sharing in all his expe- HIS SWEETHEAETS 115 riences and of being the refuge and reinforce- ment to which he is accustomed to come about everything. Thrice fortunate is the boy who has such help from them. XVHI FORMING HIS HABITS A BOY has to have quite a number of habits, if he ever expects to be much of a boy or to become a man. His body needs the habit of turning food into blood and then blood into boy. His mind needs the habit of turning sights and sounds into truth and character. His memory is to be merely the good mental habit of holding on to what he has learned. His morals, at any time, are very largely the sum of his habits in learning and practising truth and right. When nature equipped him with the power of forming habits she did him a great kindness; for without the reinforcement they bring, he would be no farther along the day he dies than the day he was born. Habit is that power which makes it easier to do a thing the second than the first time, still easier each subsequent time, till, by and by, the thing almost does itself. If it were not for habit, he would, each day, have to learn again how to talk and walk ; would have to get acquainted again with his father and mother and friends and the contents of his pock- ets, and with his books every morning. But that is too dismal a subject to dwell on. 116 FOEMING HIS HABITS 117 Habits have a way of increasing in power, with a cumulative effect, till there is scarcely a limit to what they may enable one to do. Eobert Hou- don's wonderful memory was the result of habit. He trained that memory to retain everything he saw, till after only a few moments in a large li- brary, he could leave the room and give the title of each volume, the shelf it was on and its dis- tance from the end of the shelf. He travelled over the world, giving exhibitions of his remark- able mental habit, called memory. It is through habit men learn to do things that are, at first, disagreeable, even wrong, without feeling it. Mr. George Staunton saw a murderer, in India, who, in order to retain his life and his caste too, submitted to the horrible penalty of sleeping seven years on a bed whose top was studded with iron points, made as sharp as they could be without breaking the flesh. He had al- ready served five years and his skin was like the hide of a rhinocerous, but he told Mr. Staunton he had learned to like the bed and he thought he should continue to use it from choice. A pirate tells how his conscience made a hell for him after his first murder; then he killed another man with less discomfort and he kept on till he could lie down by the side of his victim and sleep soundly. So the matter of habit has its horrible, as well as its helpful, side. It really may have a deterrent effect on a boy to know, in advance, that he can get used to lying 118 THAT BOY OF YOUES and drinking and stealing and doing every kind of badness, and becomes more and more skilful and heartless and inured to it through the help of habit. That may prompt him to keep his eye on the dangerous thing. And he can grow more lazy and shiftless and cruel and avaricious, when he once starts at it, till he becomes a bundle of vicious habits. Yet he can start in the right lines and make habits that will be both a pro- peller and a protection to him. Dr. John A. Broadus used to say to his students: "Practice makes perfect bad practice makes perfectly bad." Make good habits and you can make good. But a boy has to have help in initiating his habits, for he is likely to start some wrong ones. Here again we see that God-given instinct of imi- tation at work. He gets the muscular habit of walking from seeing others walk and from the guidance and support of hands that show him how to take the first step. He will need some habits, after awhile, that he doesn't now know he will need, and he will not start those habits unless someone gets him at it in a directive way. He is almost sure to get some to going which he will find a great injury to him, but he doesn't know it now; and the most serious thing about it is that he will find it very difficult to get rid of them. It does seem easy, sometimes, to give up good habits, while the correction of bad ones is one of the hardest things ever attempted. It seems no task to grow crooked teeth, but if you under- FORMING HIS HABITS 119 take to straighten them the dentist will have to keep all kinds of machinery in your aching mouth, for weary weeks. But the straightening of crooked teeth and pigeon toes and hent backs and crossed eyes is easy compared with reforming hahits when they are deformed. Deforming good habits is much easier. Those who understand the workings of brain and nerves tell us that when we think, a certain amount of energy is discharged in the brain, and that energy goes tearing through the nerve tis- sues making a path as it goes, and the next dis- charge of energy will follow that same path, till all of it flows that way, unless we prevent it. Habits make roads for thoughts and feelings and purposes, and roads should always run in the right direction and be built of the right material. Even when a good road has been built, some wrong thought may send a discharge of energy in the wrong direction and quickly cut out a new path for the feet of habit. One really has to be keeping up his roads all his life. A habit will live forever, unless it is interfered with. As none of us has ever failed to get some wrong ones started, we have the perpetual task of forming good ones and reforming bad ones. The great habit-forming time of a boy is from birth till twelve. The golden age of memory is from ten to fifteen. Dr. Hawies says that if one wants to adapt his muscular and nervous habits to the playing of the violin, he must begin before 120 THAT BOY OF YOURS he is ten. I undertook it after I was thirty, and soon quit. At twelve a boy comes under the reign of law. Tendencies and activities crystallise into hab- its very rapidly. All the time that elapses be- tween the doing of a thing the first time and the second is engaged in giving a set in that direc- tion. In the fall, the beginner at swimming bids good-bye to the water, with a great awkwardness, bnt is surprised the next summer, to find that he has made decided progress since the fall before, though he has not been in water except in a bath- tub. The growth has been in the direction of the bent given to his muscles and nerves. Dr. James reminds us that we learn to swim in winter and skate in summer. No one knows when some emergency may arise that will require all the stores of strength se- cured through the aid of habit. Down in Ludlow, Kentucky, a deaf old man was crossing the rail- road track when he looked up and saw an engine coming upon him. The engineer had seen him as they came around the curve, had given him the signal, and when he saw that the old man had not heard it, had put on the brakes, but was not able to stop in time. When that old man saw the engine at his side and almost felt the cow- catcher against his feet, he didn't have time to get out of the way by walking across or turning back. As quick as a flash, he turned a hand- spring backwards and escaped with a few harmless FORMING HIS HABITS 121 bruises. He was able to do that because the mus- cles had formed the habit of doing such things years before. Every good habit the boy can form he will need either in the ordinary duties or the unanticipated emergencies of life. It is mental habit that directs muscular actions. Moral habits make important decisions instantly. Questions have to be decided, not after careful thought, but without thought ; the cherished senti- ments and the usual ways of doing will prompt the decision. No one is swept off his feet by a sudden temptation. He falls because he has been in the habit of giving hospitality to wrong ideas. The defaulting cashier had been a mental de- faulter before he did the overt act. The great tasks of the mind can be accomplished because the mind has the habit of accomplishing all its tasks ; it can lift its heaviest loads because it is in the business of lifting loads. The great value of the concrete example cannot be ignored. Clear and discriminating teaching also is essential. No one else can form his habits for him. Mr. Dooley says : " You can lead a boy to college, but you can't make him think. " Yet his intelligent and enthusiastic co-operation can usually be secured, in the formation of desirable habits, if someone studies his needs and his nature and helps the boy, as if his own life depended on it. XIX CULTIVATING HIS WILL THE culture of his will means the culture of the whole boy, means more than does the culture of any one other part of him. "We can point to all the magnificent failures we care to think of and they have everything else but will. It means the power to decide, to determine, and to stick to the determi- nation. Men may have genius, as Coleridge had, and be as inefficient as he. They may have intel- lect, and yet lack the organising and vitalising power of will. If the boy has no will power to start with we may dismiss him at once as a hope- less case. If he has a weak will it may be trained ; if he has a strong will it must be trained. The feeble will may be reinforced till it acquires resist- less force ; the strong will may evaporate in force- less wilfullness. Both kinds must be taken in hand and set right and set to going right. In his culture every boy ought to have hard- ships. Judge Lindsay says, "The best hope I can have for any American boy is that he will have a hard time rather than a good time, infinite diffi- culty, rather than ease." Someone has said that " character consists of a perfectly educated will" and the statement is not untrue, though it 122 CULTIVATING HIS WILL 123 may not include all the truth. It requires a judg- ment to weigh, a conscience to recognise and de- mand the right and a will to determine and stay by the right. In the light of that truth it seems passing strange that, when we have arranged courses of study for the culture of all the other faculties of the soul, we never have gotten up one for the scientific study and the artistic culture of the will? Perhaps it is not so deplorable after all, because, while the studies are prepared for other faculties than the will, it requires the will to push through them and that is the very best dis- cipline it can get. The hard struggle most of us have been called on to make from the beginning has been a better course than any one could devise in an artificial way. It is claimed that New Eng- land farmers have revelled in the hard conditions found on that "stern and rock-bound coast" and back in the interior, and have been so satisfied to get less money but more men from the contests, that they have been slow to avail themselves of the advantages of the scientific farming of recent years: they don't like to miss the discipline that comes with the struggle against hard conditions. But the time seems at hand when methods must be deliberately planned for the culture of the will. It is a live question. Hardships are growing less hard. Few duties are required of a boy in the home as compared with those he used to be called upon to perform. Boys are left to themselves more. They live in a more complex environment, 124 THAT -BOY OF YOUES amid scenes and activities that make a confused impression on them and do not attract them to any definite line of willed action. Life is system- atised and they find themselves in the grip of an order of things that often relieve them of the need of initiative. Machines instead of muscles do the work. They are called on to watch a machine in- stead of putting will power into their muscles. Very few muscles are called into use in factory or office ; some are never used at all, but the pull on the nerves is steady and devitalising. The will is atrophied. Life is on the surface and the virtue of thoroughness, which means throughness, doesn't seem necessary. The era of machines is an era of shrewdness and not of strength. It is a time when boyhood misses the authority so distinctly felt in other days and the will grows without steadfastness. There is no strong author- ity above and controlling, thereby serving the pur- pose of director and exemplar. I am not pessimistic in pointing out the undesir- able characteristics of to-day, in their relation to the culture of the will, the keystone of boyhood and manhood, but I am frankly telling the truth in order to ask all who have charge of the boys of to-day to see to it that their wills have the train- ing which it is so difficult to gain without intelli- gent planning. The conditions that tend to impair a boy's will require that he have power of will to meet them. That much more will must be cultivated in him. CULTIVATING HIS WILL 125 The late Sam Jones said that a man needs "a backbone like a telegraph pole," and he referred to will power, or, at least, to one phase of it. The boy has not only the tremendous task of getting a good strong will in the face of influences that are undermining it in a very subtle way so subtle that he would usually resent the intimation that there were such influences at all but he has to learn to choose the thing that, in each case, is what he needs rather than what he desires, or what will secure future good rather than present gratifi- cation. No boy knows how to do that till he is taught. The boy has to get his judgment working clearly and reliably. He has to get his sense of right so unerring that it will choose the thing which, perhaps, he does not now wish, and do it because it is better for him, or will be better for him in the long run. These decisions which he makes often have to be the result of the unconscious sentiments and reflections that have been gathering in his soul. Take into account another fact that he is, and must ever be, unconscious of many of the influences that determine his decisions and shape his life, and you feel that there is peril due to his helpless- ness which calls for all the assistance you can render. There is nothing more satanic in our commercial life than the disposition to exploit childhood for revenue. The weaknesses and the powers of innocence have not escaped the cupidity of commercialism, as it has exploited the play 126 THAT BOY OF YOUES instinct and the sex impulse and all social senti- ments to enervate the will by throwing over child- hood and youth the spell of false and vicious pleasures. Another appeal to men to help the boy get a true and strong will is that the unformed creature has to take a broad sweep of life and make decisions at sixteen and eighteen that are to determine his character and standing at sixty and eighty, in- stead of waiting till his maturity to decide. Now let us make a brief summary of the chief things the will does. It must determine on what the judgment decides; it must drive each power in its own specific work; it must get to working automatically, with the support of all the other powers, so that it will take its decisions from habit; it must stand for what is good for one rather than for what one prefers. When properly trained it is not only indispensable, but it is the best thing one has. Persistence is considered, by common consent, equal to any other power we have in value, and that is a function of the will. Mr. John D. Rockefeller and the famous Eev. Dr. John A. Broadus were talking and the prince of preachers asked the captain of industry what he regarded the reason for the largest number of fail- ures among young men and Mr. Rockefeller re- plied, without hesitation, "The lack of the ability to stick to a thing." Von Moltke's habit was to " First weigh, then venture," and never turn back. CULTIVATING HIS WILL 127 There are several things that must be done for the boy, in order to develop his will : First it must be protected from disease, for there are diseases of the will as of the stomach, or blood. Physical laziness is a disease of the will. He must have work as a preventive of this, if for no other reason. A large Dumber of the ailments are only mental and any ^e who can reach the will, with almost any kind of stimulus, can cure them. The extraordinary cures of which we have heard so much were almost all a treatment of the will for its diseases. But effective protection is accomplished through active assertion of the will. That is secured through Second Authority. An authoritative direction of the boy's life is just as important as his life, no less, no more. That authority must express itself more in directive than in corrective ways. But he must not mistake that higher will, it may be of his father and mother ; it may be of his God. Dr. G. Stanley Hall, a man who has been in the fore- front of American students ofechildhood and espe- cially of adolescence, says: "Will culture, for boys, is rarely as thorough as it should be, with- out more or less flogging. " If flogging is re- quired, at any time, in the discharge of the sacred function of parenthood, then the painful duty is not to be evaded. As already said, a higher will to which his must bow is essential to the steady and rational growth of his will. No human an- 128 THAT BOY OF YOUES thority is effective that does not lead to a respect for divine authority. Third his will must have manual training, as expression and outlet and reactive discipline. There is not a faculty of the soul that does not get discipline through manual training; but, as strengthener and trainer of the will, it excels. You have to have the will to believe, the will to remember, the will to achieve and the will to dig. Manual labour involves hardship and that is neces- sary to discipline. It co-ordinates all the physical with the psychical and that gives the psychical a complete outlet. Exactness in work requires, and corresponds to, truthfulness in thought and speech. It is a soft and silly sympathy that shields a boy from hardship. XX BEING HIS OWN MAN EVERY boy looks forward, with special delight, to the time when he will be his own man, as he likes to phrase it. By that he means the time when he can do as he wishes, as the grown folks do, and not be responsible to anybody but himself; when he can quit going to school and running on errands, if he wishes. All of us were once at that stage and it is not wrong to want to be capable of directing our own lives. The boy may love his father and mother as he should, but he wants to be free from their control, just as they are free from the control of their parents. If he doesn't know it at first, he has to learn that he can't become his own man by simply pass- ing out from under the control of his parents, but he must come under the control of his own well- prepared judgment and will and conscience. When he reaches the age for taking himself out of the hands of his parents, just as they once reached a similar age, he should have been so trained in the mastery of himself that he is ready for the new responsibility. There is no safety in freedom, without self-control. Unless he has been given little tasks in self -direction all along, and more 129 130 THAT BOY OF YOUES and more, as he got used to it, he will have too big a task on his hands all at once. The best thing his father and mother ever do for him is to teach him to get along without them. Many a boy is, in fact, wiser than his parents and is so recognised before he is old enough to be set free from the law of obedience, but it is not a good thing to let him know that they think him wiser. Before he is really his own man two things are necessary. He must reject every other mas- ter; he must secure positive and personal control of every power of his body and mind. Three rivals will dispute his right. One rival will be some strong personality in the form of a boy or some other person who will so appeal to his weaknesses, or even to his good traits, as to get the ascendency over him. If that boy controls him, for better or worse, he is not his own man. Another rival is public sentiment, in the form of the " bunch" or "gang" with which he goes. A boy will help make laws for the crowd, without feeling the need of any discipline for him- self and yet he is not his own man as long as he allows those laws to dominate his private life. His other rival is found on the inside of himself, among the passions and impulses and fancies which are likely to take the reins of government in hand any minute. A hot temper may be one of those rivals. When he is controlled by temper or jealousy or envy, when he lets any vulgar passion run away with him, that becomes his master. The BEING HIS OWN MAN 131 effect of this is to weaken his will, confuse his judgment and dull his conscience. If he does not acquire such mastery of himself by the time he is twenty-two, he is almost sure to become a waif, the plaything of his own moods or of exterior influ- ences. There is a certain kind of false pride which often takes command of a boy. I frankly confess it was the case with me when I learned to chew tobacco a habit that lasted only about two weeks, thanks to the pain it gave me one day when I was ploughing. When a boy with yellow stain on his fingers walks into an office and asks for a position, it takes the boss only about two seconds to gather all the evi- dence he needs that the boy can't be trusted, for the simple reason that an appetite is in command and may spoil his work at any minute. Mr. Luther Burbank will not employ any one who smokes cigarettes, because that habit prevents the control over his nerves necessary for the delicate work of cultivating and training plants. A man was about to offer a very important po- sition to a young man, and they chanced to ride together on the cars. The young man was asked, by some travellers, to engage in a game of cards in which they put up a small stake, and he ac- cepted. The employer did not make the offer, because he knew that any one who engaged in gambling was not his own master and would be wrecked some day. When a boy becomes his own man he has to take 132 THAT BOY OF YOUES in hand a good many things that belong to him- self. One is his imagination, for instance, and its control is no easy task. He must know when to turn it loose, which way to send it, when to recall it and how to harness it up to heavy work. All his other powers must be in hand, ready for or- ders. Now a boy naturally prefers to control others rather than himself. Thinking he is right, he is not apt to single himself out for any disciplinary treatment and he usually regards enforced obedi- ence to those who are over him as all the dis- cipline he needs, which means that the task of self-control must be set by another. Boys form laws and by-laws for their clubs, but they don't aim at discipline in the interest of self-control, though they may gain it, as they often do, uncon- sciously, through contact with each other and obedience to their own laws; they gain it uncon- sciously and without aiming at it, mind you. And he has another drawback. He is in a state of unstable equilibrium; he has to learn himself as his new traits come out. Then he is apt to drop everything else to get acquainted with the latest comer among his attributes ; while he is do- ing that, something unexpected is apt to take place. The result is turmoil and seeming defeat. But he mounts again and is in the saddle. Thus he learns by experience. He is not perfect, but he is aiming to be, in his imperfect way, and there are some things he is trying to do. Dr. Broadus BEING HIS OWN MAN 133' used to say that a good student was one who could take up his studies when he would rather not, could go on with them when he would rather stop and could stop when he would rather go on. In other words, he could make himself do what he ought to do, whether he wanted to do it or not. Such a student is his own man. A good test of self-command is one's ability to fix and hold one's attention to a given matter as long as one wishes and then as long as one ought. A boy can't be his own man without first get- ting control of himself. That means control over his body, so as to conserve its strength, prevent spoliation of its power and increase both its phys- ical and moral value. It means that he must keep its powers up to its highest. He is not his body's master, unless he keeps it clean and knows how to relax and rest knows how to take himself when those curious and rapid chemical changes take place in the body which compel an instant re- adjustment of himself to his task. He must be master of his muscles and imagination and his ideals. Knowledge of his sex-nature and its mis- sion is essential to self-control. To summarise the suggestions implied in the foregoing: First he will never become his own man truly, unless, for a long time, he is somebody else's boy t owned and directed by him or them, with a view to becoming his own. He will not be apt to ac- quire the power of self-direction, unless he is 134 THAT BOY OF YOUES given a start in the right direction and taught to steer himself as he goes. His parents' hands are the two hanks of the stream that prescribe the direction in which he must row, but they must never do his rowing for him. By and by he may choose another channel for his life and guide him- self. When they leave his life like an unbanked river to flow into any morass that invites it, they do so on pain of dire disaster. His nature demands, even though he does not always voluntarily recognise the need, that he should be authoritatively directed in the early stages of his life. If direction is given in the right spirit, he usually receives it with special pleasure. The reins of authority must be held slightly taut, so that he will feel the lightest pressure and have a chance to become a fellow- labourer with those in authority over him. Thus he learns. Second he must learn, at the earliest possible moment, that the authority of the parent is de- rived from the One from whom all authority comes, and that, when he is released from that of the parent, he must deal directly and personally with the original Father, as the parents did, or better than they did. In releasing him from their control, they are simply passing him over to the One from whom they have been receiving all their authority and for whom they have been preparing him. If he is really ready for that transfer, he has learned from them how to direct himself un- BEING HIS OWN MAN 135 der that higher One, through the experiences he has had and the instructions received. Third parents must lead him into those ex- periences without which he can never acquire self- control, by restraining themselves and leaving him room to exercise his powers of choice and invention. His free powers must be utilised in the tasks assigned to him. David said, "Thy gentleness hath made great." In everything in which man's interests are, God has restrained Himself, and left us something to do and room in which to do it. That is the only way to reach the kingship of self-control and the boy is en- titled to be led along that way. XXI THE BOY PEODIGY A BOY wonder may still be found, here and there, but I am not bringing a charge to that ef- fect against any boy of my acquaintance. There have been such in the past, there will be in the future, and we have heard of a few now living, though it is not likely that the charge could be sustained in every instance. We can never forget Watt, whose genius showed itself when he watched the steam lift the lid of his mother's tea-kettle; nor John Stuart Mill, who was thinking through philosophical problems, and in technical language, long before he reached his teens. Pope said: "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," even though some now think he never did anything but lisp, except to limp. The late John Fiske was a good Greek, Latin and philosophical scholar before the average boy of that age had learned his gram- mar. At fourteen Huxley was a philosopher. Students of music can never forget how the boy Handel stole into the chapel in the dark and played the organ till they were attracted from all over the estate of the Duke of Saxe-Weissen- fels and thought it must be an angel while the 136 THE BOY PRODIGY 137 duke pronounced him a genius ; nor how Wolfgang Mozart was playing tunes at four, and did not have an equal on the harpsichord at twelve. Jo- sef Hofmann was the wonderful boy pianist a few years ago, and now has made good as a man. In music early genius has been brilliant because the emotions are always more active in youth than the intellect; next to music they have ap- peared in literature. Pope wrote his "Ode to Solitude 7 ' at twelve. At twelve Macaulay won fame by his first volume. Cowley wrote "Py- ramus and Thisbe" at twelve. At sixteen Tasso wrote "Rinaldo," Hugo printed a volume of poems and so did Chatterton. Shelley wrote "Queen Mab" and Disraeli "Vivian Gray" at eighteen. Dickens was made famous by . his "Sketches" and Byron by his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" at twenty-one. Alexan- der Hamilton was talking and writing like an old prophet at twelve. In a few months, after arriv- ing in New York from his native West Indies to attend King's College, he had thought out the question of the right of our country to independ- ence, and, in a patriotic meeting, in the open field came forward and electrified the audience with a great speech and he was only seventeen. The late President Harper of the University of Chi- cago was such a wonder as a grown man that we forget his remarkable boyhood. Nor must we forget the newsboy, Thomas A. Edison. And there have been "Boy orators" and "Boy 138 THAT BOY OF YOUES preachers" and "Boy business men.' 7 No one denies that there have been, and still will be, boy geniuses. Little William J ames Sidis has dazzled the wise men of the east with his conver- sations, writings and addresses on philosophical and mathematical subjects. He will soon know all that Harvard can teach him, while Nicholas Wiener is treating Cornell to the same sort of a sensation. Frederick C. Leonard, the young as- tronomer of Chicago, only fifteen now, was writ- ing learned articles for the English and American magazines at thirteen. We are not producing a great many boy geniuses at the present time, but perhaps we have all we need. We really do not need as many as they did in past times, because the average boy knows so much more about scientific and other matters than grown-up men knew a hundred years ago. Franklin would have given all his possessions to know as much about electricity as any boy of twelve knows to-day. The mass of common knowledge bulks so large and the level of the intellectual life is so high that we do not need men to blaze the way as far ahead as the genius used to do. And even when there is a genius he is not so far beyond his contemporaries as the genius of the past was ahead of his. We have lifted up the commonplace till the uncom- mon does not dazzle quite so much as it once did. Boy wonders had a way of coming in groups, and they have come when conditions have been THE BOY PRODIGY 139 especially favourable to them. The greatest group that ever arose at one period was in the Elizabethan Era, just at the revival of learning and the waking up of the sentiments of liberty. The Crusades had made the people of the world better acquainted with each other, the discoveries of new lands set people to travelling, the intellec- tual treasures of Constantinople were released from their long imprisonment, the printing press was invented, the inductive method of study be- gan to be employed, and the spirit of dawn was breathing through the darkness. Then the great boys began to report, especially in literature, science, philosophy and statecraft, but mostly in literature. True to the gang in- stinct, they selected one group of callings at a time. At one period they are almost all literary geniuses, at another time musical ; again they are painters, still again statesmen, and at the present time they are mainly "Captains of industry, " "Wizards of finance," "Napoleons of business/' And it is genius, too. Rockefeller is perhaps as great a genius, in his sphere, as Shakespeare was in his. Not every boy considered a genius by his ad- miring relatives is one. He may be precocious but not a genius. But suppose there is a real boy genius at large in your community, what then? It brings up the old question, "Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" His spirit or that of his kindred? Who knows but it may be only a 140 THAT B'OY OF YOURS case of infantile or puerile precocity which will disappear as the years go. Neither he nor his friends should ever forget that; try as he may, he may be distanced by some whose powers do not develop as fast as his. There are men-wonders whose boyhood was not unusual. Wagner, Bach, Goldsmith, Cowper, Franklin, Darwin, Defoe and DeMorgan belong to the latter class. And there are some alarming possibilities be- fore him. Genius is not insanity, as some of the wranglers have claimed; nor is it abnormal, save that it is unusual; nor is it what is called a " sport." One may be what we often call a "uni- versal genius," like Goethe, or Michael Angelo, or Gladstone, or Shakespeare. And yet he is apt to be one-sided and have some serious defects which will prove his undoing, as a defect in will, judg- ment, sympathy. He may lack in power of con- centration. The latter was the defect of Cole- ridge. The prodigy may be repressed and neg- lected. He may be led to think that he does not need training, nor discipline, but genius is never independent of such things and it takes hard work to mature and bring it to the fulfilment of its bright promise. The delicate nerve tissues may be burnt out before he reaches the more serious work of his life. Genius may belong to one who has such serious defects of character as to make his undoing almost certain. Either by birth or culture he may be a combination of genius and fool. I saw a negro in the South who was once on THE BOY PEODIGY 141 exhibition at the Atlanta Exposition for his abil- ity to divide and multiply, even with fractions, without pencil and paper, for he could neither read nor write. But that was all he could do. I knew another genius in mathematics, with a col- lege education, but the last time I heard of him there was nothing left but the mathematics and that was obscured and rendered ineffective by the mistakes and evil of his life. If, on careful examination, the boy proves to be a genius, never allow him to suspect it. If he should find it out, tell him of the fall of the genius and linger over its harrowing details till he him- self becomes aware of his perils; then put him at hard work as if his life depended on it. Have him play with other boys, and they will help you keep the conceit out of him. Be his master and his adviser and keep heavy responsibilities from him till he gets beyond the most dangerous point. You may save him, after all. It may also be a comfort to know that some men who, in their maturity, were put in the genius class, were in their boyhood looked upon as stupid among these are Wagner, James Russell Lowell, Goldsmith, Sir Humphry Davy, Byron, Hegel, Heine, Humboldt, Grant, Seward, Napo- leon, Darwin, Homer. There is hope for the genius, as well as for the dullard, but his success must come through a teachable spirit and growing responsibility. XXII ORGANISING BOYS IT is easier to organise boys than to organise any other kind of business. They are standing around waiting to be organised into almost any sort of band which they or their kind friends can think of, for almost any kind of purpose. The boy has the honour of having inspired as many " movements" as any one of the other groups in whose behalf the various historic organisations have been started young men, young women, young people, men and the rest. He also has the satisfaction of having precipitated a " crisis," now and then, of more or less large dimensions ; and he can get up a local " crisis" any morning, before he gets up himself. He was the main child in the " Children's Crusade," centuries ago and he almost started the modern Sunday-school movement, single-handed and alone. He can excite more kinds of interest than any one else and a great deal of anxiety as well. For him all kinds of factories are at work, with day and night shifts, turning out shoes and caps and pants and medicine and surgical instruments and school books and doctors and teachers and bread and meat and musical instruments and sweet- 142 ORGANISING BOYS 143 hearts and all the other products needed by him in his all-absorbing business of being a boy. He is an unconscious patron of all the industries and starts a few himself. But of all the lines of business which his pres- ence with us has stimulated that of organising him is one of the most flourishing. He needs all we have ever done for him and more, but what is more to the point, he likes it even better than we do. There comes a time when he and the other boys would rather be organised than anything else. They stand around waiting for the organiser to come their way, but they can't wait long; if he doesn't come soon, they do it themselves. The best thing is that they do not insist on doing it themselves and really prefer the superior wisdom and skill of older people. They know, however, when it is done right, when it is structurally adapted to the nature and the in- terests of boys; for, if it does not take hold of their present interests in order to lead them out into other unknown but desirable interests, it is in opposition to all the laws of child-life and the laws of pedagogy as well. If it does not start with the boy where he is and as he is, it will never take him where it wants to take him, nor make him what it aims to make him. His characteristics include activity, hero wor- ship, loyalty, social enjoyment, play, love, altru- ism; and his interests are the things that appeal to these elements. The right kind of an organisa- 144 THAT BOY OF YOURS tion must appeal in a way to lead to nobility of character. Something like twenty years ago the Boys' Brigade was started for his benefit and served with great effectiveness. It caught him by his devotion to the heroic, put regimentals on him and held him to a course of instruction in the manual of arms and field practice, as a soldier of righteous- ness. It failed to address itself to all his inter- ests, or addressed them in a defective way, and it has gone. But each movement as it has passed has left him a wiser and better-equipped boy, and left its place vacant for another movement still better adapted to his needs. Local modifications of the main ideas are still used effectively. The " Knights of King Ar- thur," with each lodge a castle, founded by Dr. Forbush of Boston, is popular in the east. The " Order of the American Boy" is a growing or- ganisation. The "Seton Woodcraft Indians," started by Ernest Thompson Seton, has some vogue. Dan Beard's "Sons of Daniel Boone" is also popular. That the spirit of adventure and chivalry and service and loyalty is to be always harnessed up and utilised in making him a man is well indi- cated in the names chosen for local bands. In looking over a list of those of the "Order of the American Boy," I found such as these "Doug- las Rustlers," "Cayuga Warriors," "Ohio Rough Riders," "Majestic Guards," "Jackson Athletic ORGANISING BOYS 145 Company," "Rehoboth Bull Dog Company," " Night Hawks Athletic Company," "American Eagle Athletic Company." Here we find the articles of a rising or a falling power. One of the latest claimants for the privilege of serving him is the "Boy Scout" movement, and it is spreading with a rapidity and a momentum never before known in any boys' movement. It originated in England in 1908 under the leader- ship of General Sir Baden-Powell, who followed a plan of organisation used with the boys of Mafe- king at the time of the Boer War, though he has also very carefully studied the methods employed in former work for boys, especially in the Boys' Brigade of America. There are now over a million Scouts in Great Britain and it has spread to all the British col- onies and to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Chile, Argentina, the United States, and is still going. In our country it is advancing fast, with national officers, whose head- quarters are in New York, and scout masters in every State in the Union who have received in- struction in methods of work. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt is first vice-president and General Leonard Wood is a member of the general coun- cil. The Y. M. C. A. has taken it up and ap- pointed Mr. J. L. Alexander, one of its most expert workers with boys, to direct the whole movement in its organisation. 146 THAT BOY OF YOURS This movement ought to be the best yet, and it gives promise of great usefulness. Its whole aim is to make efficient character and it starts at the right point, with the boy's honour. "On a scout's honour" is as solemn and binding as any oath can be. It disparages war except against wrong of any kind, and therefore omits the mili- tary drill, on the ground that it injures individual- ity and versatility and narrows one's interests. This is the judgment of General Baden-Powell, who ought to know. It trains the boy in things that fit him for danger and duty, but does it by stages first as a tenderfoot, next as a second- class scout, then as a first-class scout. The in- struction that goes with each degree is surprising in its variety and fresh interest. Within the ranks a "first-class" scout may gain honour badges for ambulance work, for marksmanship and pioneer work. He learns by practice rather than in books woodcraft, animal nature, out-of-door sports, first aid to the injured, and much more ; and each boy is expected and expects to "do a good turn each day to someone." It is said that an accident can scarcely happen anywhere in England, but boy scouts are the first on the ground and render the most intelligent aid. It is democratic and will not allow any social distinctions among the boys themselves boys of lords working side by side with boys of their gardeners. ORGANISING BOYS 147 This bids fair to become the most popular, in- teresting, widespread and long-continued method of organising boys, because it seems to appeal to their "get-together" instincts and to all their in- terests; it has been thoroughly thought out, pro- viding all kinds of plans and instructions for lead- ers and variety for the boys ; it is flexible and can be made to serve social, industrial, benevolent, educational, patriotic, altruistic and religious ends ; and it is always ethical. In organising boys, parents and leaders should put them with boys of the same general age and interests, of the same station in life as far as possible, and assist them by furnishing as much suggestion as possible on the question of method, thinking on ahead of them, so as to be able to di- rect them with an intelligence that they will ad- mire. So many good plans for local organisation have been worked out in connection with the or- ganisations mentioned, and many others, that any one can get help by simply writing to their head- quarters. Sunday-schools are organising more perfectly these days. Several things are needed for an efficient class: Organisation a good leader; a clear division of forces into all the kinds of service, such as look-out, benevolences, missions, church attendance, athletics, music, etc. Some connection with organisations of a wide field and scope is valuable, as it gives them the sense of multitude and dignity of purpose. All the boys 148 THAT BOY OF YOUBS of a city or state in a given organisation, find pe- culiar reinforcement in each other. But the more individual the work can be made with the boys in an organised group the more valuable it will be. xxm HIS MOTIVES A BOY is more apt to have fairly good motives than false ones. He starts out in life with some- thing in him that will grow into a sense of right, and if he gets tangled it will be because he is taught it through the eye or the ear, or in both ways. If a boy's motives are entirely bad, he is seldom, if ever, entirely to blame. There is a reason. It may be, in fact, a case of atavism, in which he has gone back and appropriated the fetid tastes of some ancestor and his parents were not wise enough to protect him against the ravages of the atavistic beast. The inherited in- fluence did not come in the form of habits, but was a tendency or a spasmodic impulse, which could have been trained out of him. At the outset we must concede the difficulty of knowing exactly what a boy's motives are, for his deepest, most dominant motive is often tangled with superficial, secondary and temporary ones and these may be so complex and active as to con- fuse us. How to detach the real motive from this tangle of impulses and make it the dominant thing is the problem. If he asks you a question you are never sure of his purpose. It may be fun, or 149 150 THAT BOY OF YOURS fancy, or an evasion of duty. My brother once asked, "Mother, you say it is wrong to fight f" "Yes, son." "Well, isn't whipping little boys fighting?" In an argument, his one motive is triumph, not truth, though he may not be untruthful. When he claims that Yale has a larger attendance than Chicago, and you prove your statistics, he replies that as to that point, Chicago ought to have more, and he says it with the tone of one who has won a victory which must be crushing and humiliating to you. If it is football, he is ready to treat his opponents with unpitying violence and yet, when the occasion passes, he is capable of rendering them unselfish and heroic kindness. Under the motives of ambition and revenge he seems an un- tamed Indian and, the next moment, a highly- developed philanthropist. A large and active group of idiosyncrasies and faults seems all there is of him. And the hope- less thing is that he draws his motives from his stage of development and his environment. In the gang period the interests of home and school often seem secondary. He reverts to the savage type and his motives correspond. A dog fight or chicken fight appeals to him with resistless charm; and his motives match this stage of progress. The cave dwellers and cliff dwellers and Fiji islanders have little superiority over him. Dur- ing his Bohemian stage his vagrant tendencies re- veal another passing phase. HIS MOTIVES 151 Two things encourage us. One is that these surface motives are not the deepest things about him. They are not the symptoms of anything bad, but of a new stage that he has reached, when new forces of the body and faculties of the mind are being released. He hardly knows what hurts him, but something is keeping his eyes wide open and his nerves all jumping. The other encour- agement is that these are the curious ways in which his very deepest and truest nature is find- ing itself. His devotion to the gang is the spirit of loyalty starting toward universal brotherhood; his fondness for contests is the first exhibition of the warrior instinct getting ready to fight the good fight of faith; his Bohemianism is an incipient cosmopolitanism; his local attachments are the prelude to patriotism, his battles for his partners the forerunners of his battles in the higher inter- ests of his fellow men. His sense of honour sometimes breaks down when physical ailments keep him from getting possession of his own powers, and somebody is not wise enough to have surgical, or medical, or athletic, or dietetic attention given him. It more often breaks down at the treatment he re- ceives at home. Nervous irritation and the sense of being a negligible quantity often lead to loss of respect for his own word, or of noble pride in his own actions. He usually responds to the right treatment, as the flower to the sunshine. It is indispensable that his honour be recognised 152 THAT BOY OF YOUES and trusted. It is there to start with. Get a microscope, if necessary, and identify and locate the divine thing. It is conscious of itself and must be recognised. To be doubted is to be doomed. He is often called a bad boy when his energy is construed into evil and his mischief into malice. When he is accused of deception or of taking things not his own, it amounts to an invi- tation to him to lie and steal. When wrong has been done and he is charged with it, without pre- liminary study and inquiry, he soon concludes that his reputation is already bad and he becomes reck- less as to whether he deserves it. Many a boy has been reclaimed to honour by such men as Judges Tuthill of Chicago, Lindsay of Denver, Brown of Salt Lake City, Dr. Merrill of Denver, and that growing list of lovers of chil- dren who are substituting sense for scolding and brotherly friendship for brute force, through his exhilarating sense of being trusted. If you sus- pect his motives never let him suspect that you do. Out in Council Bluffs, la. one section of the po- lice force is made up of boys. They do duty on special occasions, and the two conditions of ad- mission to the "Kid Force," are efficiency and good behaviour between times of serving. To be trusted in that way is an ambition that keeps hun- dreds of boys on their good behaviour all the time. The Chief of Police of Chicago is utilising the Boy Scouts in the enforcement of law in several HIS MOTIVES 153 sections of the city. When you depend on the boy he can be depended on. One of the severest tests of his dependability is in meetings which require reverence and sym- pathy from him. In the Carter class of more than a hundred bays of the Calvary Baptist Sunday- school of Chicago, the devotional service preced- ing the lesson study, is the most impressive part of the hour and it is partly in the hands of the boys themselves. They will not allow any irrev- erence. The extraordinary efficiency of the Boy Scout work is due to the fact that each one is "on a Scout's honour." A young man who had lost a position because of inefficiency, was employed by another firm, be- cause they were compelled to have someone and he was the only one they could get. Soon they noticed that he had good suggestions to make and he found that they would listen. He began to climb and, before long, was in a very responsible position and became indispensable to the firm. When asked why he could not keep his first job, he replied, * * They treated me as if I was a fool and I acted like one." That discloses a reason why a boy's best must be recognised. To attribute a bad motive for the freakish and prankish ways of a boy is one way of making him permanently prankish, or worse, while the surest way to make his motives good is to consider him good and let him know that you do. Speaking of the more advanced schoolboy, Dr. 154 THAT BOY OF YOURS Stanley Hall says: "Of all safeguards I believe a rightly-cultivated sense of honour is the most effective at this age." It is indispensable that the boy have a concrete instance of what honour means, in those who make the atmosphere and spirit of home. When he breathes in an atmosphere of unreality, self-seek- ing, false reasonings, false treatment, he is dazed and stanned and usually loses the sense of dis- tinction between truth and falsehood, honour and dishonour. During the days when he is mostly instincts and impulses, before his conscience is actively in command, his elders are his conscience, and when they are without that rudder, he is at sea. Injustice and unfairness are flagrant in his eye and he knows when his own honour is dis- honoured. He can sometimes give points to his father in more ways than one. Sometimes it is a sense of injury that leads him to seek by dishonest means that to which he is entitled. "When his sense of honour is ignored and treated as if it did not exist at all, he often takes his first step in lying; many a mother won- ders why "Tom can't be trusted," when she may be doing her poor, foolish best to make him an habitual liar and thief, with brilliant prospects of carrying the process still further. Any one can find the fibre of fidelity down in his soul who knows how to be a friend to him and show faith in him. His motives will also need protection. Those HIS MOTIVES 155 that are temporary may be treated in a way to disfigure him for life ; in fact the temporary way may be made the permanent by false treatment. An attempt to suppress the outflow of his tumultu- ous nature may make it ingrowing, may bottle it up to be emitted all his life in inopportune ways. The war-whoop may become malignant if it is not allowed to come out in all its innocence. The gen- uine good-will must be allowed to effervesce in its own way as a protection to his good nature. The machinery gets relief by blowing off steam. Re- pression may produce explosion, or compel him to seek a congenial environment away from home. That is always the beginning of dark days for all concerned. His motives will also need infection from with- out, so as to correct and complete them. If one wants to get yellow fever, he needs only to let some ambitious mosquito bore into his cuticle with a bill that has been dipped in a cauldron of yellow fever germs and crawl over him with feet that have a good assortment of germs clinging to them. Then the victim is ready for the worst. One can also have health infection, as by antitoxin and in the infusion of pure fresh blood from some healthy person. It is of the highest importance that a boy's motives be frequently purified by fresh infusions of motives of the highest kind. When he is thus assisted, direction will be needed more than correction. Formation will prevent the need for reformation; if the former 156 THAT BOY OF YOUES is right, the latter will not be necessary. To dis- cover his best motives, to discriminate them from the secondary and temporary, to direct them in righteous and rational ways this is someone's high and inescapable duty. But something more must be said of the motive, as the power that moves him to action. Motives must be recognised in the activities and made to work without consciousness. That comes as the result of vital possession. Dr. Hall pertinently says, "If authority supplement rather than super- sede good motives, the child will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it di- rectly and, as a final result, will choose the state and act you have performed, in its slowly widen- ing margin of freedom. In this heat the motives are merged into the life and are mechanicised in the action. " XXIV HIS FAILINGS His failings are exclusively his. He owns them but seldom owns up to them. Some are due to his immaturity and will disappear with the passing of infantile diseases, warts and freckles and child- ish features, unless they are fixed by some fool- ish older person, who insists that passing phases of his development are permanent forms of de- pravity and succeeds in turning the changing hues into fast colours, all red. That boy showed his quality who defined a hypocrite as "A boy wot comes to school wid a smile on his face." When the nervous Sunday-school teacher said to the mis- chievous lad, "Tommie, I'm afraid I won't see you in heaven," it was due entirely to his sense of humour that had not yet gained its social perspective and propriety, that he asked, without hesitation, "Why, what have you been doing!" Some of his failings are due to his being an immature human being, some to being an imma- ture man, and the latter will not slough off at all. We have to classify them as among his unavoid- able limitations, not to be outlawed, but to-be harnessed up and put to work drawing his per- sonality through bogs and over mountains. We 157 158 THAT BOY OF YOUES are not to look on them as hopeless liabilities but as productive endowments. And yet they will al- ways be idosyncrasies if not faults. He is often tortured with the feeling of being misunderstood. He is rebuffed for his humor- ous tendencies. A gentleman, just alighting from the cars, said to a boy, "May I ask you how far it is to the Palmer House I" The youth replied: "You may do so this time, but you must never, never do it again.'' He was probably misunder- stood and called impudent when he was only a humourist. There are four kinds of bad boys: The boy who is called bad without really being thought so ; the boy who is both called and considered bad, but is not so ; the boy who really is bad, but was almost compelled to be so; the boy who is bad in spite of all kind efforts to make him good. The boy of the first class is almost sure to be- come bad, and to move down into the third class. To call him bad is very apt to make him so, un- less he is a boy of a very fine sense of humour, or has enough good sense to see that the accusation is meaningless, a mere effort on the part of some folk to appear virtuous, or an exhibition of un- regulated playfulness. The problem is not what to do with the boy, but what in the world to do with people as old as they are who think and talk so. The penitentiary would be a little too severe; so would the workhouse. A reformatory would be about right and the feeble-minded institute HIS FAILINGS 159 would be just the thing. "A House of Correction for Idiotic Parents," would be useful for each county. The boy of the second class, both called and considered bad when he is not is abundant. He is considered bad because he has not learned the artistic and emotional adaptation of his voice to the indoor life; because he celebrates Hallowe'en and April Fool 's day as often as he can ; because he has not learned to refrain from wearing out his trousers where you don't want him to wear them out; because he shirks responsibility and hard labour; because he does not show respect for the one who calls him bad; because it is easier for that one to call him bad, and thus dispose of the question, without the necessity of careful dis- crimination. Having classified him that way one can go on and treat him accordingly, for it never seems worth while to try to do anything for a "bad boy." "Idiotic" is not just the word for such folk. Perhaps the word "brutal" is not as scientific and colorless as required. If the boy does not become bad it is not their fault, while, often, he has the finest elements and sentiments to be wished for in a boy. Of course a boy is sometimes thought bad because he is found with that sort of companions. Instead of bringing the charge against him and compelling him to live down to the adverse opinion, his true friends, if he has any, should rescue him from his degrading as- sociates. We may summarise reasons why he 160 THAT BOY OF YOURS seems bad it may be the effect of hot or humid weather, restraint on his out-of-door instincts, dis- like of unjust limitations, passion for nomadic life, not sufficient or good enough food, lack of physical exercise, self-deception, a dreamy, impractical disposition. The boy of the third class would rather be good, if you should put it to a final vote, but in spite of himself, he has been made bad. Called and considered and treated as bad, he at last says: "It is inevitable; I have to be bad, so here goes." My soul waxes indignant every time I hear a parent say: "You are a bad boy"; "You are a good for nothing"; "You are not worth your salt." Sometimes the sense of being unfairly treated is so acute that the boy loses all control of himself. An eminent minister says he was left motherless, and his father had no power to secure his confidence in fact, treated him as a bad boy till he became one ; but his father was wise enough to bring home to the boy one day a stepmother who made him her friend and kept him from ruin. There is an organ called a heart thumping around somewhere in every boy, and if you know how to find it and get your fingers on its strings, you can lead him into better ways. "Paper, boy!" said a man, as he hastened to the station. "Can't do it," said the tough-looking boy; "git one from dat old blind man across de street." "But I'm in a hurry." "Can't help it. Dis is old Blindy's territory, and if any boy sells papers in dis block HIS FAILINGS 161 us boys gives him a lickinV You would never have dreamed, from his looks, that that boy had a heart. The boy of the fourth class has had much to keep him good but he won't be good. He is a mystery. No, not that exactly. He made some mistakes a generation ago, possibly every genera- tion for ages, in the selection of ancestors. But even then two things may be said for the encour- agement of his friends : There is a bit of heart left; there is some power of choice remaining. So environ him properly, let him see in you what a sublime being a man can be and invoke for him the sleepless sympathy of the "Friend of sin- ners." Call in friends to help you; send him to the country, or to a new neighbourhood. Tell him how people like him. Dr. Merrill is almost exactly right in saying that the boy is all right and that the problem of the bad boy is the problem of those who have him in charge. His ancestors ought to confess the handicap they put on him in giving him their dispositions, and then get to work to protect him from the natural consequences of it till he can be led to choose something higher and better for him- self. If his inherited disposition is not hopelessly bad, he may be tempted into badness by the pub- lic. The city life is in an environment created for business purposes and not with a view to his interests. Every fault of a boy seems to be ap- 162 THAT BOY OF YOUES pealed to in the average city, with, its crowded homes and poor playgrounds, and the call both to his love for unwholesome pleasures and for money with which to pay for them. Sometimes he is sud- denly overwhelmed in the results of some blunder which he never meant to be a crime, but is con- strued as a crime, and for which he is made a criminal. A Chicago boy stole a pair of shoes which he thought he needed, was taken to the jus- tice 's court in a patrol wagon, tried, bound over to the grand jury, kept in the county jail twelve days in company with hardened criminals and was treated as a criminal while waiting to go be- fore the grand jury. The passion for mystery and romance and for adventure may lure him to ruin. The stimulus of the city may excite him into abnormal activity. The police often arouse the lawless spirit in boys. "Daddy" Norris, in the neighbourhood of the Eay School in Chicago, is an instance of the opposite kind and his influence for good is one of the strongest in the whole community. There are times again, when every boy finds it easier to do wrong and gets a surprising amount of outside assistance in doing it. The running- away age is from six to eight, the lawless age from eight to twelve, and then the sense of law begins to awaken in response to the law of the gang. During these critical days, it is criminal and often fatal to be irritable with him. His boyhood weak- nesses aid the temptations gluttony, vanity and HIS FAILINGS 163 often laziness. All the crudities and contradic- tions make him more open to evil. Imitation and imagination and, later, the development of the sex instincts all seem on the side of temptation; and they are, unless he is well cared for. Kapid and radical alternations of buoyancy and depression, conceit and self-distrust, tender affection and law- less defiance rock him to and fro, a seemingly helpless victim. Dr. Hall says temptations to truancy come about thirteen and under; temptations to mali- cious mischief at fourteen; larceny and disorderly conduct at fifteen; more mature offences at six- teen. We must go to his help. And yet nature has made provision for his pro- tection and a special providence aids those who are responsible for him. He has no reinforcing memories of former victories, though he is ac- cumulating them. His father should have vic- tories and hold them for his benefit. He has a yearning for companionship and his father has been elected to supply him with all he needs. The old Spartan law was not far wrong, which held the parents responsible for the delinquencies of the children. And the teacher was right who said : "Whenever I find anything wrong in my school, I immediately examine myself and I usually find the cause of it in myself. My body is out of or- der or some unpleasant event has affected my spirits, or I am worn with excessive toil." Classify a given wrong first of all, decide if it 164 THAT BOY OF YOUKS is a crime, or a misdemeanour, or a blunder. Next inquire into the cause, or causes, of it. Then remove the cause, even if it is like removing one's own eye. The point of contact is one of the first condi- tions of teaching and you must have a point of contact with the boy. Begin at the point of his real worth. Assume it. Never doubt him, if you can avoid it. If you suspect him of being bad, never let him know it till you have tried every other means of reclaiming him. Trust him and let him feel that he is implicitly trusted. Confide secrets to him and thus stimulate the virtue of fidelity. When some temptation sweeps him off his feet, help him back to self-respecting, yet self- distrusting, purity. Partnership with him must grow closer as peril becomes stronger. Tramping and fishing and hunting and playing and reading with him will help. If the home were somewhere near right, also the schools, also the public in its provisions for the physical and mental and artistic and ethical welfare of children, there would be few bad boys, for heredity would soon become as correct as en- vironment. XXV HIS PUNISHMENTS THE well-reared boy who slips through life with- out getting some sort of punishment there is no such boy. Even if he should never do any- thing to require punishment but no, why deal in pure hypothesis? If he should be able to escape all the vigilance committees that are after him, it would be solely because he is doing the punishing and administering the discipline himself, and in secret; but we need not tarry over that rare, if not impossible, specimen. Some divergence from the line of rectitude is inevitable, even when that line is clearly drawn by the teaching, and attrac- tively illuminated by the practice of those who have him in charge. He cannot escape all his monitors, including his conscience. So punish- ment must come, because, if there be no results of wrong-doing, there can be no wrong-doing and we have a "fool world" to live in. Those who have him in charge have been nomi- nated and elected to administer all discipline; but you must first catch the hare before cooking it, and you must actually find something to punish, before the punishment is administered. It takes wisdom to know with certainty in every case 165 166 THAT BOY OF YOUES whether there has been wrong-doing; and, if so, what it deserves, how the punishment should be administered, and what the purpose of it is. There is an intricate problem presented, when his parents start out to punish him. Sometimes a boy looks impudent, has an irri- tating accent and seems to deserve attention on general principles. In that case, circumstantial evidence becomes conclusive. Sometimes it is his awkwardness and not his meanness that leads to a break. All of us are interested in what Tolstoi writes, and he says his ungainly, ugly, stupid-look- ing face and coarse, unshapely hands and feet dis- tressed him and made him more intractable when a boy. Often it is the sudden awakening of some power that compels the boy to do some unusual, even unlawful, thing, and he will at once subside into docility again. An irritated parent may whip him to work off his own anger, and that is worse than hanging the wrong man on circum- stantial evidence. To mistreat a boy is a crime and ought to be treated as such. It is not always possible to keep a boy from thinking he is un- justly treated and, in that case, all you can do is to do right and let him get over his miff whenever it suits his convenience. Punishment can be reduced to a minimum by careful discipline in the directing of his life. Di- recting a boy's life is a good deal like directing the course of a horse. There are two ways of driving a horse, a right and a wrong way. The HIS PUNISHMENTS 167 right way is to hold the reins firmly so that the horse can feel the faintest pressure on either line. Through that means he will enter with you into the enjoyment of the drive. The wrong way is to let him have the reins and do as he will, un- til he does something you do not want, then to go at him and beat him till his skin and his heart are sore and he grows weary and would like to do something desperate; in that case the horse's mistakes are wholly due to the way his driver has treated him, and the latter deserves the beating. Good discipline will save drubbing. It is my solemn conclusion that in almost every case the wrong-doing of a boy, that requires punishment, could have been prevented by the parents, and that they ought to take the punish- ment themselves. They ought to have honour enough to take it openly and voluntarily, so that he may have the moral effect of seeing such a rare instance of nobility. There is still an altru- istic element in suffering. Sometimes the parents are more or less blameless people who have turned him over to himself before they have taught him to control himself, and sometimes they are fool- ish enough to imagine they can give way in his presence to any kind of undesirable self-expres- sion without sowing dragon's teeth in his soul and in their home. If they both, or that one who is responsible for it, will only put the instru- ment of punishment in the boy's hand and let him apply the rod, it will present to him an appeal 168 THAT BOY OF YOUBS of overwhelming moral grandeur. It Has been tried. But when punishment is truly deserved, it must be given and the occasion made an epoch in the life of the boy. It is not to be made an end in it- self, nor a matter of retribution, nor any one's vindication, but an education to the boy. It must, first of all, bring him back to the line of rectitude from which he departed. It must awaken in him, not alone a sense of the majesty of right and truth, but a new desire to conform his life to it. It must be the means of starting a new habit and giving him a new attitude of mind toward what is right, a new respect for those who stand in this severe way for what is right and true, a new re- spect for himself, which comes through self-re- proach and then self -rectification. It must pro- mote every virtue in him and reinforce every worthy motive. That must be the aim of the one who inflicts the punishment, or his deed is worse than the boy's offence. It will not be easy for the boy to enter, at once, into sympathy with the whole scheme. When he hears: "It hurts me more than it does you, my son," he knows one way in which it does not and cannot. . Inseparable from the punishment must be the effort to remove the occasion, and even the cause of the offence for which it was inflicted. If they trace it back to themselves they must protect him from themselves, their modes of speech, the at- mosphere they create by their inner spirits, and HIS PUNISHMENTS 169 their failure to give him the wise discipline and the steady, authoritative direction which his life needs. If the cause of it is in him alone, as in rare instances it is, they can undertake no higher life- task than protecting him against his own faults. He will respect authority, but not those who wield it like tyrants or outlaws. He may be per- suaded to enter into any right scheme of dis- cipline involving punishments and rewards which means that he will co-operate in his own develop- ment a thing very necessary if there is to be a right development. The sentiment of fear, which one may appeal to in a right way, may be har- nessed up to active work and turned into love. I am glad the respectable psychologists are telling us that fear and pain are among the indispensa- bles of education. Hall says: "Dermal pain is not the worst thing in the world and by a judi- cious knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and by being flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting de- fiance, deliberate disobedience, ostentatious care- lessness and bravado, are diseases of the will, and in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy, the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as, in surgery, it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in childhood means moral traumatism of some sort, in the adult. Few parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just where it 170 THAT BOY OF YOUES is needed. It is, as someone has said, like knock- ing a man down to save him from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are but very faint types of what nature has in store, in later life, for some forms of perversity of will, and far better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasks as penalties." Punishment must be free from threats and harshness and anger, for they defeat its purpose. It must not be occasional and intermittent, but as each need arises. The quieter and freer from noise and talk such occasions can be made, the more surely will they serve their true purpose. A storm of abuse around his head is a greater of- fence than the one he commits. Scolding and nagging are inexcusable in any one except the devil, and he has too much sense to give way to them. Punishment must be adapted to the nature of the offence. There may be retribution but no vindictiveness in it. If food, or play, or anything he is especially interested in, is involved in the offence, he may be denied that very thing, with the most telling effect. All the interests of the boy require that he be punished when he does wrong and that the punishment be made an indispensable element in his moral education. Understand the meaning and purpose of punish- ment, the nature and grade of the offence, and administer the punishment exactly suited to that offence ; secure his co-operation in the moral pur- pose of it. XXVI HIS TROUBLES His troubles are one thing; the sorrows that come from them, another. He has more troubles than sorrows, because he manages to turn some of the latter into sport and spunk. Part of his troubles are imaginary, but they are active and efficient and fruitful, till he finds them out. Some of the real ones he refuses to recognise, and they die a natural death, unknown and unsung, but it is pathetic how much real, downright suffering he can go through, and it is inspiring to see him "keep smiling" notwithstanding. His troubles are partly due to the fact that he is only a child. To be sure, he may be one of those peculiar combinations of sensitiveness and censoriousness which it is hard to endure, and he may keep disgruntled and disagreeable all his life. In that case he will be a lifelong sorrow and shame to his family and friends. There seems nothing to hope for, except in the transforming grace of God, and he is apt to be too much disgruntled with his Maker to avail himself of any offered help. He suffers because he is cut bias. We drop that kind of a boy right here. 171 172 THAT BOY OF YOURS Or he may have that combination of egoism and egotism which will persist, unless he can be taught unselfishness and good sense by a fascinating ex- ample, reinforced by an irresistible authority. He is unaware of his failing, though no one else is. He suffers because he is the centre of every- thing; people seem to go by centrifugal rather than centripetal impulse, and they fail to revolve around him. He suffers from an overweening sense of self. There may be hope for him, but the transforming influence must begin at once and work steadily. His habits are rapidly forming and turning his sentiments into crystals. Crys- tals cannot be easily broken. Now, when we have made due allowance for his imaginary troubles and those which come from an almost hopelessly bad make-up, we still have left enough to require very careful study and accurate treatment. The first element we discover is his ignorance hence his lack of self-control. He is new and he sees the newness in a distorted and some- what discouraging light. He and himself are not familiar friends as yet. It was only recently that they met for the first time. Sometimes he takes himself too seriously; sometimes too flippantly. He is constantly running into some new nook and corner and compartment of himself that he was not aware of before and he finds powers and fur- nishings that surprise and somewhat bewilder him. This requires him to readjust himself to HIS TROUBLES 173 himself ; he is fortunate if he is not panic-stricken and put to flight. Another element of complexity is the fact that both he and himself are steadily expanding, grow- ing out of each other's knowledge till he often has to say to some newly arrived phase, "It seems to me I have seen you somewhere before," and he must, even, now and then, say: "I have not the honour of an acquaintance with you." That may bring on sorrow, especially if the strange com- pany seems to be chilly or domineering toward him. Strange reactions into sorrow and depres- sion come, during which he is chased and driven and beaten by some power within his own person. There is a time when conscience begins its ac- tivity, and can give him intense sorrow till all things are working normally and harmoniously. The new master brooks no interference and sometimes is the occasion of acute pain. His feel- ings that have been governing him must surrender the reins to judgment and conscience, and they do not get into harness together quickly. When the social instincts begin to awake and the bony structure has been rapidly thrown up, like the skeleton of a skyscraper, he has the pain of self -consciousness and the sense of mal-adjust- ment to the world around him. If the tender flame should get awakened at that time, he is in a state of unstable equilibrium, lacking in quieting knowledge and reassuring command of himself. The sense of that pervasive lack of perfection 174 'THAT BOY OF YOUES may be so acute as to depress him. The sense of a need that no one may show him how to supply may throw a very long and dense shadow over him. The thought of being misunderstood often tor- tures him. His humorous and playful tendencies are not always as interesting to others as to him- self. There is a blend of sweetness and awkward- ness, with the latter prepondering. When some evil sweeps him for a moment from his feet, only the eye of God can see the shame that tortures him, and no one knows how gladly he would listen to someone who could set him on his feet again. His inability to express his deep affection for parents and teachers makes him de- preciate himself, whereas a little girl might ex- press herself in words appropriate and accurate enough to be printed in a book. He is conscious of affections and admirations that he cannot express, and would not, for fear of being misunderstood. He longs for appreciation, for companionship, and suffers when he does not get them. He can't be contented when people treat him wrongly. He is called bad when he knows he is not intentionally so. He finds out that some seemingly and pro- fessionally good people are vulgar and untruth- ful, and he often hangs his head in shame for them. In his discovery of the awfulness of death, he thinks of it as hanging over him, and no one is apt to teach him to think calmly and confidently about such realities. When a lad a pious Sunday-school HIS TROUBLES 175 teacher gave me an interesting book and on the blank page was written for me: "Memento Mori ' ' < ' Be mindful of death. ' ' Think of it ! Yes, a boy's sorrows are real, whether the cause of them is real or imaginary. He has three needs at such times, in fact at all times. He needs a friend who has passed through similar experi- ences and who has not forgotten all about them, one who can show a tactful companionship with him, without impatience or obtrusiveness, one who will tell him the meaning of his own nature, espe- cially the physical and emotional; he needs a good deal of hearty play; he needs work in which he can see that others are concerned. XXVII THREE PERILS IT is worth while to devote a separate chapter to a consideration of certain inescapable, though not invincible, perils of boyhood. They are not merely possible but actual perils, which he can no more fail to meet than he can fail to meet the ris- ing sun in the morning; for they grow out of the nature of the boy himself and not out of his en- vironment, though his environment may either sharpen or soften the perils. First is the peril that comes from his natural and unguarded suggestibility. This is especially the peril of the pre-adolescent boy. Children are more responsive to suggestion than are older peo- ple, and that is one of the reasons why they are seldom allowed to testify in court. The exact definition of suggestion is not to our purpose. There may be a subconscious self, which carries out into thoughts or words or actions the sugges- tion made. Or it may be merely the influence of one person over another. But the power of the teacher and parent and friend is largely through suggestion. The suggestibility of a given boy will depend on three things the kind of temperament he has, 176 THEEE PERILS 177 the kind of training he has received, and the stage of development he has reached. The power of a given suggestion will depend, in addition, on the nature of the suggestion and the person who makes it. These are things that make it a time of peril. His experience does not furnish him an adequate criterion for judging of the things suggested; his knowledge of motive is very defective; his will does not get hold of its work, intelligently and steadily, till he is in his teens. For these reasons he is ready to take up with any suggestion that appeals to his clamorous and discordant impulses, especially if it comes from one whom he likes. It appeals to curiosity and enlists the imagination. A good suggestion has almost as good a chance as a bad one, if it has a touch of pathos or love or adventure or humour. Three main sources of suggestion are to be watched what he sees, what he hears, and the persons around him. The pictures he sees reach to his depths ; and the actions of which he is the witness are very apt to reproduce themselves in his imitative actions. People insinuate them- selves into him before he knows it. The enemies of children use these three means for their undo- ing books, pictures and persons. The picture shows are not all bad, but when they are they are disastrously so; the books are not all vicious, but there are too many which are, and they are within their reach. Few of the people they meet are 178 THAT BOY OF YOUES immoral, but only one of that kind is needed to poison the mind effectively. The bad books and pictures suggest cruelty and revenge and inde- cency, and inculcate the spendthrift habit, as well. A boy was arrested in Chicago, the other day, for breaking into a house ; and he got the suggestion' by reading of another boy; who tried the same thing though he failed. On the other hand, good pictures and books have suggestive power for good. A little boy named Henry Schlieman listening to his uncle reading a translation of Homer's "Iliad" re- solves to discover the long lost site of ancient Troy, and he does it. Joe Eeid has before his vision every minute the picture of Harry Peck, the young man who teaches him at Sunday-school ; he meets the boys one evening each week for games and reading, sometimes goes with them on a Sat- urday afternoon nutting party, sometimes on a skating party, and, in the summer, for a two weeks ' camp. When they see how he also attends to business, as if everything depended on it, no sug- gestion that ever came to Joe and the other boys is quite so powerful as that. The only way to keep boys from meeting the peril of suggestion is to kill them. The only way to protect them when the peril assails, is to give them pictures that will arouse them to their best; furnish them books charged with an ennobling stimulus; bring to bear upon them personal in- fluences that will call out their admiration for THREE PERILS 179 those persons and their aspiration for better things. The second peril is one of the two that come with adolescence. I may call it the peril of con- fusion due to the sudden awakening of so many new elements in his nature and the sudden dis- covery that he is in a new world. His voice that runs to cover one minute in the basement and the next minute soars into the sky, is a fit symbol of the period of confusion at which he has arrived. The nerves are alternately tightened and un- strung. That period of storm and stress, as it has rightly been called, is more fully described in another chapter. It is often a time of despera- tion and discouragement. Some boys have felt at that time, that life was not worth living and have, with difficulty, restrained their hands from their own destruction. This has been true not only of geniuses but of ordinary boys. They are out in a large world with discordant powers, not connected, in a happy way, with any of the world's interests or people. The help the boy needs is evident. One who knows his difficulty and shrewdly establishes points of happy contact with him, without allowing the boy to suspect that he knows his trouble or is trying to help him, has the key to the situation and can tide him over the rapids. The third peril which belongs to the adolescent period is due to the development of the sex in- stincts. The currents of new impulses may sweep 180 THAT 'BOY OF YOUES him off his feet into self-indulgence in a bestial way. That peril exists apart from the character of his environment, though environment may make it more acute, and it is the business of those who make his environment to protect him even at the peril of their own lives. Obscene talk is like tin- der to the inflammable impulses of his nature. Imagination may kindle unquenchable flames out of the sulphurous material brought to him in that way. What is to be done for his protection? Some writers insist that accurate knowledge of his own bodily functions will arm him for victory. Knowl- edge of his bodily functions, as he is able to con- trol and utilise that knowledge, is right, as far as it goes. But some knowledge is to be with- held from him even after he has the problem on his hands. It is to be remembered that the more accurate the knowledge the more it piques both curiosity and passion. We have allowed the idea of complete enlightenment of children about them- selves to carry us into worse than unwise ex- tremes. Sophistication is safe only after educa- tion; education is possible only as one gets control of himself; control of one's self can be complete only as one comes under the control of the one Master of our spirits, the one Lord of our life. The absolutely essential protection comes through his choice of that One, whose will and help he gets in the Bible, with the Spirit's presence and as he tries to do the will of that Master. THEEE PERILS 181 Whether you have much or little to tell him about himself, you must know all about him from a personal knowledge of him, from self-knowledge and from a knowledge of the results of the studies given to boyhood by the students of the subject, like Hall, Starbuck, Lee, Coe and such men. To be ready with desired information for him about himself is to give him confidence in you. Not only are you to hold accurate knowledge ready for use but you are to give it at the right time. He is sure to get a knowledge of sex functions. He is entitled to get it from those who seek to lead him into self-control instead of exciting incontrollable impulses, as is the case when the debased and the vulgar are his teachers. But the knowledge must be given only as it is needed, and as he can use it aright. Knowledge alone is not enough. A no- ble sense of responsibility must be stirred and noble emotions must drive out the ignoble. Diet is a matter of great importance. Cleanliness is often a preventive of debasing thoughts. Com- panionship and sympathy may prove a preventive, without the need of much specific instruction. But one other want must be supplied. Knowledge is good as fast as it can be used and as it enables the boy to gain the indispen- sable assistance of the only Master. Parents and Sunday-school teachers must help him find his real Help. The physical director, who doesn't under- stand that deepest need of the boy should not be allowed to have any part in his training. To put 182 THAT BOY OF YOUES it frankly, plainly and urgently, the boy's only hope of meeting these perils with any satisfactory success is Jesus Christ, the Friend of sinners, the Friend of boys ; the problem of protecting him is the problem of bringing him, by his own choice, into vital relation with Christ. That requires wis- dom, tact, knowledge, constancy. And your boy surely is worth all of that. XXVIII HIS HOME IN the midst of his greatest excitements and enjoyments there ought to be a steady and per- ceptible pull at his heart strings in the direction of home; and there will be, unless there is some- thing very much the matter with him, or the home ; if the trouble is with him, it probably began with the home. There was presumably, a welcome for him when he first took his place as a member of the family. That welcome must await him whenever he returns from work, play, or school. If his arrival is greeted with complaints and nag- ging about what he has and has not done, he will make his arrival as late, his departure as early and his absence as long as possible; and he will take his permanent departure as speedily as circum- stances will permit. If he is regarded as a use- less cog in the machine he is apt to throw it out of gear. He is very susceptible to suggestion and will usually become what he is treated as being, whether he is so at first or not. There is a story of a boy who heard that home is a type of heaven and instantly made up his mind never to go to heaven if it was in his power to escape such a calamity. He had had enough 183 184 THAT BOY OF YOUES of that kind of heaven. The boy has his own ideas of what a home should be and they may be wrong, but those who are making his home for him have to work with his ideas as well as their own ; and even when his are inaccurate they indicate some of his real needs and are worth knowing. But when his home is about right and has gotten at him in a right way from the start, it will be the most fascinating place anywhere to him. Every- thing is there, love and welcome and appreciation and understanding of him, and discipline and wor- ship and fun and laughter, everything but his boy friends and the athletic grounds and some other such things; but he knows that he can bring his friends there at suitable, and even at some unsuit- able times, and, while he can't exactly bring the ball games and the ice fields and his other sports into the home, he can bring the spirit of all his sports with him. He is usually sorry when the moment comes to drop the game, but when he knows he is going into his dear home, it alleviates his sorrow. And when he goes out into the great world, to try his fortunes, it is not because he loves his home less but because it has prepared him for his career and he feels its power all the more. One of the noblest impulses he will ever cherish will be the desire to reflect credit on the home that made him. All this is on the assumption that he had the fortune to get a good home, at the draw- ing, for it seems somewhat like a lottery. HIS HOME 185 He is a distinct part of the household and is en- titled to a definite place in it where he can be monarch of all he surveys. It is mighty comfort- ing to him to know that there is one room where he is at home with himself. He is also entitled to a position in the house- hold, as well as to a place in the house, and his standing must be in their understanding. If he gets the right standing he is willing to do a lot of running for the benefit of the family. It is not enough to say that he must work because someone else is the bread-winner and he ought to be will- ing to do something. Another motive must be touched, that he is a part of the household and what he can do is of the highest value in itself. And so it is. Manual labour has mental and moral value ; and when special talents are utilised it gives a special training for his life work. When they are used in the equipment of the home, he derives a special reward from it. Drawing, painting, music, mod- elling, writing, reading aloud, reciting, these may have a productive place in his home life. He has to be allowed to be his own self and to do what he can do. When Tom's mother and Joe's mother brag each on the other's boy and nag, each her own, each is entirely unworthy of her boy. Be- sides, a boy must be doing what he is to be doing in the future and getting ready for it interesting and intelligent work. His place in the home is not in the centre, nor 186 THAT BOY OF YOUES on the throne, but by the side, or under the wing, of the head of the home. He is a boy, but only a boy. He holds the future, but he must be held at present. He is not to be a prig, an overfed pet; nor a pig, overfed pork ; nor a despot, an over-in- dulged dependent. He is not the centre about which the family revolves, nor a tyrant adapting it to his caprices. When a boy rules the home he ruins himself. He is to be adjusted to the family life and not the reverse. He may be a born ruler, but is to be under regents till he comes into his own inheritance and learns how to rule. But in that subordination, he is entitled to find respect for his personality, nis talents, his indi- vidual tastes, his elemental and God-given right of choice, on the proper exercise of which his ef- ficiency in life depends. Even from the start, his will must not be over-ridden, but stimulated and steered. If there is a clash between his will and that of the household head, all that the latter can do is to set forth the penalty of the wrong choice and let him have all the facts of the case before him in the decision. Let him know that the pen- alties cannot be escaped, then let his own volition work it out. The plans for him must be positive, construc- tive, optimistic, sympathetic ; not negative, nor destructive, nor gloomy, nor autocratic. Those plans must be adapted to him and must adapt him to the home people. He and his father can do team work, as he assists with manual or mental or HIS HOME 187 mechanical labor with the typewriter, or at book- keeping or garden-making or farming. And yet obedience must often be exacted of him, without explanation or option, and he must know what au- thority means. Ordinarily, when his sense of partnership with his parents has been intelligently and practically nurtured, he gets discipline and delight, efficiency and satisfaction, out of it. It is a whole univer- sity in embryo, with technology thrown in. Even the care of pets is of great importance in teaching him gentleness and unselfishness and sense of re- sponsibility. They make use of the whole boy in that way. His imagination comes to the aid of the family. To call a boy good for nothing and lazy just because he dreams is a degradation of the one who says it. To accuse him of doing a given wrong is to suggest to his imagination that form of wrong-doing. To give him the sense of appreciation is to suggest that he must be worthy of appreciation. True respect for him is discriminating and re- quires self-respect in his parents. No normal parent may blame him for the things that merely indicate immaturity or for the evil results of bad home influence. Kespect for him makes certain hours luminous the home-coming hour, the meal hour, the play hour. On those hours life's high lights must gleam. One of the interesting occasions is the family gathering at the table and it can 't happen any too 188 THAT BOY OF YOUES often to suit him. My memory holds very few oc- casions so gratefully as the happy meal hours. They were social times and all six of us children were ready for joke and jest and frolic and fun, till it often grew hilarious and sometimes uproar- ious. But when the table is made the place for all sorts of snarling and reproving and correcting and wrangling, the right kind of a boy will feel disgraced by it. It spells ruin for him unless he recoils the other way in sheer disgust, or finds someone in the circle who lives above it and lifts him up, too. There are profound reasons why no child should ever hear adverse comment on another person, except when it is necessary for his protection; a father is recreant to his high trust when he al- lows any one to express himself in the presence of his boy in that way, even if he has to incur the dislike of the thoughtless or the self-righteous pharisee, by rebuking such a person. There can be nothing said about his home more to his liking than an eminent divine said in an ad- dress not long ago. He wants to find in his home not a dormitory, or club, but a place where all the home sentiments are blessed and dominant. He also wants consistency. No deception need be tried on him. He also looks for piety in his home ; also simplicity, that is, he wants it to be simply a home. This is right, for piety means that the peo- ple in the home and the boy get together in the most loving way with some daily recognition of HIS HOME 189 that other One whom they learn to call the great Father. The boy must be trusted and have the exhila- rating sense of it, as they trusted the boys at Eugby. He must find in the spirit of the home- makers the spirit into which he will grow, more and more. He must find knowledge of delicate things in a way that will not excite unwholesome curiosity. He must have a share in the work, in the deeper thoughts and in the special honours and ambitions of his home. He likes that, and it has a profound educative value for him. XXIX HIS BOOM HE needs a room of Ms own needs it in his business of being a boy. If he does not get it at home he always wants to establish headquarters somewhere else on the street corner, or a va- cant lot, or in an old deserted house, or in some basement, or in another boy's home ; which always lessens his attachment to his own home. The rule is that when he will not stay at home, he is pushed out for lack of a room. There is usually no room for him at home unless there is a room for him. He is not apt to be blind to the injustice of it, either. His little sister, bless her dear heart, has the daintiest room in the house, and mamma and papa bring her all sorts of exquisite souvenirs and decorations, till she is like a pink rose in a garden of exotics. But he is often put into any kind of a corner, with instructions not to interfere with what little he finds there and not to make any noise, as he goes to his gloomy quarters, nor while he is there, nor on his way back, on pain of being asked to vacate the house; and if his sense of chumship overrides his pride enough to bring in another boy, now and then, he is halted at the 190 HIS EOOM 191 door with a shrill voice which informs him that he is not to bring other boys home with him. Then when he is compelled to take that bundle of energy which he carries around with him out of the house and is reinforced by some other boys, stocked up with similar supplies of energy, and they go off and get into mischief, the people shake their stupid heads and say, " Those bad boys again, " when they would do far more wisely if they would organise a vigilance committee to wait on the parents of those boys. The light of the library is good for his eyes, but that is not enough. A corner of the family room is better than nothing, provided that corner is recognised as his own property at certain impor- tant times; and many a boy and girl, too can look back to happy moments when the crowd of little folks was playing at one end of the room and father and mother were talking or reading by the light glowing at the other end of that dear room. But even that is not all he wants. He has the proprietary instinct and that cannot be fully gratified without a room he can call his own. The mere possession of that room may be the training that will make him a useful citizen and property holder and keep him from becoming improvident and a vagabond. It is one and the same instinct with him and hence his room has a permanent value to him. Besides, he has immediate need for it. It is a place where he can let off steam and make more 192 THAT BOY OF YOUES naise than could be borne in any other part of the house. That is a relief to the rest of the family for they can persuade him to be fairly quiet everywhere else when he knows that there is one room always at his disposal. That room will en- able him to secure valuable voice culture. His self-respect and social standing require that he have a place to which he can bring his friends, both informally as individuals and formally as a club or gang. If he brings them there they will be in a respectable place and not be apt to get their relatives into trouble. He will be proud to have his parents become honorary or sustaining members of the club ; that will give those parents a chance to take the sting out of all mischief and renew the joys of long ago. If his sister has a room to which her little friends can come with their dolls and have the sweetest time till they get to pouting and all go home, without umbrel- las, in a shower of tears, surely he must have a place for his friends too. His room is a social centre training him for life. He wants a room where he can objectify his thoughts by means of the things he puts into it. The articles, both useful and ornamental, will match up with his inner self. If he is an artist, he will have pictures, and perhaps make some ; if he is musical, he will no doubt have a banjo or man- dolin or cornet, and if he is just a boy, he will probably have some hair-raising pictures and at least a mouth-harp anyhow. HIS BOOM 193 Dainty bed-spreads are a work of supereroga- tion ; his room is no parlor, it is a den. Rugs and carpets can come in only under strict regulations. It is hard to make them harmonise with boys. His decorations will be an aggregation of things mostly the implements and emblems of sport, with pennants in the place of honor balls and bats and gloves and knives and all the kinds of fire- arms it is safe to allow him, from a squirt gun to a Winchester. Flags are one of his specialties. He is sure to gather up the flags of various coun- tries, put "Old Glory" in the centre and drape the others around it to add to its glory. If he has the taste of a naturalist, he is likely to have as large a collection of bugs, beetles, flies, toads, snails, birds, snakes and grasshoppers as he can, and as many of them alive as possible. In after years he will preserve those collections as happy memories, while others will be able to trace a vital connection between the substantial citizen, with his thrift and his friendships, and the lad who once lived and loved and yelled and dreamed; for the virtues of self-dependence, self- control, responsibility for one's own belongings, companionship, imagination, originality and co- operation will have been nurtured by that room. XXX HIS FATHER His father is always a character of importance, but there comes a time when he becomes the most valuable asset among all the boy's possessions. It is not only good for a man to have a boy, but more important that the boy have him. When they have and hold each other, you find a condi- tion that calls for both gratification and gratitude. There is no separate chapter given here to the discussion of the mother, because, as a rule, the father needs suggestions and stimulus more than the mother, and I feel less competent to speak to mothers than to fathers. The story has been told that when Kermit Eoosevelt, while his father was president, started to the public school, he was asked certain routine questions, to which he gave answer about as fol- lows: "What is your name?" "Kermit Eoose- velt." "Where do you live?" "At the White House." "What is your father's name?" ' Theodore Eoosevelt. " " What is your father ! ' ' "My father why, my father is IT." That leaves nothing to be desired. He has two very desirable qualifications for his fathership, whatever kind of a man he may be. 194 HIS FATHEK 195 First of all it is very much to his credit and ad- vantage that he was once a boy, and that he can have a pair of boys before his mind every day his own boy and himself as he was when a boy. He may remember exactly what he was thinking about and trying to do, when he was the age of his boy. Moreover, he may know where he missed it, or hit it as the case may be, and what to think of his boy and what to do for him. He sees two boys growing up, side by side, the boy of to-day and the boy of yesterday, the boy becoming a man and the boy already a man and a father, but now becoming a boy again. The other qualification is that his boy is anx- ious to become a man. That, of course, is when he is past the age of Paul Dombey, of whom Dr. Blimber asked : * ' Shall we make a man of him ? ' ' and Paul said: "I would rather be a child. " Truly does Charles Dudley Warner say: "One of the best things in the world is to be a boy ; it re- quires no experience, though it needs some prac- tice to be a good one. The disadvantage of the po- sition is that it does not last long enough; it is soon over ; just as you get used to being a boy, you have to be something else, with a good deal more work to do and not half so much fun." Just as truly does the same shrewd and genial writer say, "And yet every boy is anxious to be a man and is very uneasy with the restrictions that are put upon him as a boy." Because he wants to be a man, there is a time 196 THAT 'BOY OF YOUES when he ceases to be a " mamma boy," as he prob- ably was till ten years old or more ; he loses inter- est in the feminine point of view and becomes completely and exclusively possessed by the mas- culine. That is the time when his father first begins to loom large. Then comes his father's great opportunity. Then memory begins to work and the lad of to-day and the lad of yesterday lock arms and march together. The true father becomes the companion, the dominant companion, of his son. He does that if if he has a memory ; if he has any idea of the value of life ; if he is much of a father. The boy will probably find out, fifteen or twenty years later, how he had his father keyed up and in a quiver all over, during those critical years of the youngster 's life ; and when he does find it out, they will be still dearer friends. For that father mounts guard and does duty in the boy's dark- ness, watching the foes that he sees standing along the road anxious to defeat and degrade the boy, just as his father stood guard over him when he was surrounded by invisible foes; for if there is one thing a boy usually declines to recognise it is the presence of danger, whether physical or moral. That father will be keyed up to be worth imi- tating, for he knows what is going on in that boy's soul knows he is imitating his father, just as nature tells him to do. Therein we discover an- other thing in the man's favour : the boy has never HIS FATHER 197 passed that way before and he is following a trail blazed and tramped for him. The special perils of boyhood, which are spoken of in a previous chapter, that father knows knows from experience and from a constant ob- servation of the boy, as the latter passes through his critical stages. He remembers how he met them and came out victor, or was vanquished. He recalls those that were due to his human nature, those that only a boy could feel and those that were due to the special periods of his development. He remembers the danger that came from fond- ness for eating, from his vanity, from his temper, from the rapid awakening of the sex impulses. And that father guards that boy as no mother could, guards him as the priceless treasure of his life, for whom nothing is too good, for whom he would gladly give every drop of blood in his veins. That father knows that his boy needs knowl- edge about himself, his body and all its profound functions, and he must not be left to gain it from the vulgar and lascivious, from boys of the street and malicious men who work his imagination ir- remediable harm. The father knows that, when passion is strongest and self-knowledge is small- est and self-control is weakest, he has to stay closest to him, in thought and sympathy. But when that father is mean and selfish and tyrannical and unfair and hypocritical; when he is always telling how good he was as a boy, and makes the story more rosy the older he grows; 198 THAT BOY OF YOURS when lie drives instead of drawing the boy ; when he holds him by the collar instead of his con- science and uses check reins and choke-straps; when his method is repression rather than ex- pression then woe betide both father and son. As Dr. Merrill says : * ' The father is a part of all the boy's troubles." Nature has given him two things to compen- sate for his inexperience and insure his safe jour- ney over the unknown path admiration for the man who is to act as escort, because he is a man, and is the particular man that belongs to him ; an instinct for following and imitating him, that works automatically. Under the shadow of the pyramids Napoleon said to his soldiers: " Forty centuries look down upon you"; but that father knows that all the centuries and generations to come are anx- ious about his son. He is not only to link the boy to him, but he stands as a representative of the Heavenly Father and must give him his really working idea of what that Heav- enly Father is. At the same time he fills that little soul's ideal of manliness, for he can run and jump and skate and wrestle and ride a horse and whiz on a wheel. He is not only law-giver but hero now. Some things that a father must do have been already suggested. Now let it be said that he must do them in a way to impress the boy's mind with three things : HIS FATHER 199 1. That his father knows him through and through, so much so that he cannot be deceived about any act or motive. That boy must feel the grip of a master in his father's hand. 2. That his father loves him as well as knows him. It is not a knowledge that makes him im- patient, but rather makes him more patient. 3. That his father was once a boy and had the same weaknesses and needed the same help from his own father. It is not a bad thing, on the con- trary, a very desirable thing, that his father tell the story of his struggles with the same difficulties, even if he has to confess some things that cause him sorrow. He will be everything he knows his boy ought to be. Yes, the good father will know and love and associate with his boy, direct him, join his gang, go fishing, hunting, camping, rambling, working, worshipping with him, and each will think that life is worth living. XXXI HIS BROTHER AND SISTEB IF he has not a brother and sister he is a most unfortunate creature, almost as unfortunate as if he had no parents. When the home is full of children, all the better ; and, best of all, if they are as near to his age as they conveniently can be. They will do as much to train him as the average parents and almost as much as the best of parents. The trouble of bringing up an extra boy or two is more than justified by the extra boyhood they will produce in each one of them. An only child is at a very serious disadvantage, especially if he is a boy ; for a girl can stay in and become a companion for her mother, but the av- erage boy has a fermentation going on inside of him that he must have some help with or the house will become too small for him. I have no desire to make the life of any "only boy" who may read these words more miserable than necessary by telling him how unfortunate he is, but the truth must be told, even in this case and at the peril of making others uncomfortable, for there may be some who ought to know the facts. We might as well issue our catalogue of woes of the "only boy" at this point, and then go 200 HIS BROTHER AND SISTER 201 on to something more exhilarating, if not more hilarious. 'The "only boy" is apt to get spoiled. His par- ents concentrate all their attention on him, instead of distributing it to a half dozen. They are al- most sure to pet him too much. Every child ought to be appreciated and wisely praised but petting and coddling are another matter. They do too much for him and do not exact enough from him. If they don't spoil him by too much petting, they may overdo his training. He may want his own way and get it, much to his own injury. He is in danger of becoming any one, or all, of sev- eral kinds of undesirable citizens boss, prig, dude, coward, or a Lucrezia Borgia, in trousers; or he may simply be a "little man," old and in- firm before he cuts his eyeteeth. The "only boy" gives his parents all the greater work in the pre- ventive measures required, and in supplying to him the companionship he needs and would get from brothers and sisters. He grows up without the friction between him- self and other children which is so necessary to enable a child to find himself. He has no one to quarrel with and that is an irremediable loss. He has a hard time to learn his rights, or the rights of others all by himself and needs some very excellent parents to repair the deficit. It cannot be said that the "only child" is foredoomed to failure. To be sure, from larger families have come most of our great men and women, and fam- 202 THAT BOY OF YOUES ilies with an only child have furnished more thai* their ratio of the useless and criminal classes, and yet some only children have been great and good. We are but taking averages and indicating prob- abilities. An older brother is simply indispensable to the little boy's happiness and the little brother is an important part of the older boy's life, especially if their ages are close together. If some years are between them they are both to be pitied. The little boy will be pathetically tagging after the older one whose tastes and companions are in advance, his little heart aching to follow and breaking because he can't. The older one will get out of patience and be rough, but even so it is bet- ter for either one of them than to be an only child. With his sister he can't well be a perfect com- rade, for the simple reason that she is a girl and he is a boy, yet there are great enjoyments and some essential training for them both as they play together and have other interests in common. A little sister is sure to admire his greater strength and daring and make him her ideal and hero. A vigorous, manly boy can scarcely imagine the pride a younger sister takes in him. That is a benefit to him beyond computation. It wakens in him the sense of responsibility for her and that develops character. She checks his tendency to- ward roughness, while under his influence she be- comes less delicate and more wholesome. There seem to be two periods of companionship HIS BROTHER AND SISTER 203 between him and his sister. One comes very early, before either can reason about it, and they are ready to cry, or fight, or suffer for each other ; the other is years later, when he is in the social era of life and is looking on girls with new eyes. Then his sister often becomes a new companion, for he learns a new appreciation of her. But he and his brother have common interests, all the way through. One advantage is that he gets the benefit of the other children's presence in the house, without being fully aware of the advantage ; he may even think they are very undesirable members of the family yet still become more deeply indebted to them for his training, each year. From the way they often talk, we might conclude that they re- gard each other with deadly, incurable enmity. The showers of verbal missiles they rain down on each other 's heads surely portend life-long dis- aster to their friendship, but the next moment it is " clear shining after rain"; they instantly be- come confidential allies against foes within and without, whether those foes are the older ones who foolishly interfere, or other children who dare to taunt them. Disagreements and quarrels they do not regard as incompatible with friend- ship or good manners. It is not the quarrelling that is always wrong; it is the noise that is unen- durable and requires suppressing. If a snarling nature is found in a child it is a horrible inherit- ance, likely to become permanent, if trained by 204 THAT BOY OF YOUES the example of those from whom he inherits it. God have mercy on them and steer their lives into peaceful waters ! A certain amount of discord seems unavoidable and there are two compensations. One is that they know how to end their troubles without in- jury, except to the ears and fears of the onlooker. Nature attends to it. Interference with their logomachy is usually a failure and brings only artificial results; sometimes it cultivates a whin- ing spirit or the feeling of being ill-used, in a child. Eepression and exhortation accomplish little else than secure armed neutrality. The other compensation is that the children are training each other, even when they are discord- ant, provided the discords are not habitual. They get experience in applying the principles they have been taught ; and they usually succeed to the satisfaction of both affirmative and nega- tive, plaintiff and defendant especially if the principles taught have been illuminated in the practices of their parents. These contests in wit and skill and strength augment their powers, be- cause each child learns by experience where his rights end and those of others begin; learns self- control and altruism; learns how to take defeat without whining or tale-bearing; learns how to take care of himself when he meets outside chil- dren and yet respect their rights. In a family of several, no one child can be boss, or get all he wants, or have his way about everything. Per- HIS BROTHER AND SISTER 205 haps the boy and his brother and sister are ren- dering their greatest service to humanity in train- ing their parents in those powers of insight, sympathy, self-control and self-assertion, required in bringing up such a group of children. For- tunate for the parents, as well, if the family is not a "one child " family. XXXII HIS READING IT is very seldom you find a boy who doesn't like to read and when you do find that exception, it is usually one who has unusual tastes for some- thing else, or has not learned what a time he can have at reading. When he does get at the busi- ness of reading he is seldom satisfied with less than a book a day. Of course, his tastes are unformed and are not at all versatile. It is before the reasoning and the self -directing powers are awake and at work and he never wants books that appeal to what he doesn't have. What he reads must appeal to those impulses and that imagination which are there to start with, or he will not read it. That limits the literature to a certain class. It must have action and adventure. It must conform to a boy's definition of a novel "plenty of talk and something doing on every page." It must be en- tirely free from abstract reasoning and general- isations, except of the most patent and appealing kind, but it must be vivid and vital, with all the interests of people who have their veins full of red blood. It is not necessary to exclude history and sci- 206 HIS EEADING 207 ence and politics and ethics and religion from the books he will willingly read; but those teachings must be put in the form of life, with thrilling and manly action. He will enjoy them and call for more. He will be getting what he needs, but he would revolt at it if it were put in a didactic form. It is possible to put the things that are best for his growing intellect, his awakening conscience and his glowing impulses in a form to be very fas- cinating to him and the form may be effectively varied from stage to stage of his advance. It is also possible, and very easy, to allow his reading to become exactly what it ought not to become at a particular time if he reads liter- ature that gives the attractions of heroism to vice and vulgarity and encourages a certain careless- ness in boys. In fact, the chances are in favour of his doing demoralising reading, unless he receives very careful direction from those in authority. It seems easier to interest him in reading of that sort, and that sort of reading is often prepared for him with more skill than is given to the prep- aration of the better kind. Books and papers of the reprehensible kind are abundant and aggres- sive. Literature for boys is pouring forth, in streams, from the press. Fiends incarnate are engaged in the production of books and papers for boys. They like the money that comes from the sale of books and papers as well as that which comes from the sale of " liquid damnation." Someone has classified the undesirable books for 208 THAT BOY OF YOURS boys as "poisonous," "criminal,"' "insipid," "platitudinous" and "too difficult." In our city libraries, they are growing more and more careful to keep out not only vicious books but those that are too highly seasoned. Several authors whom most boys like at a certain age, have been shown the door, though a few of their stories may not be objectionable. A given style may not be very bad, but too much of it may spoil the im- agination and set the young life awry, while the vicious stories that have terrible fascination for the boy nature, unless that nature has been disci- plined, are responsible for many a young crim- inal. Jesse Pomeroy, the boy murderer, con- fessed to Mr. James T. Fields that he had read sixty dime novels about robbing and stealing and scalping and cutting throats. On the other hand it is hard to estimate the uplifting influence of a noble book well adapted to a boy's nature. In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin tells us of some books that had a formative effect on his life and one of them was Cotton Mather's "Essays To Do Good." Boys may not find it very easy to ac- quire a fondness for essays, but there are books of a more solid nature than the exciting story which so confuses them that they scarcely know whether they are riding, or walking, or sailing the air. Of course, a censorship has to be established over his reading and the censor must keep in mind what the boy likes best, what is really best for HIS BEADING 209 him and how to get him to like the best. He must know the books; that is certain. When he has selected the books he may have some difficulty in getting them read willingly. It is fairly easy, if the tastes have not already been perverted. If they have been, then there is trouble ahead. Perhaps the censor can add to the attractive- ness of the book by reading it aloud, for the voice and the personality add a new element of inter- est. Perhaps the boy himself may become inter- ested in reading aloud for the benefit of the rest, and that will add to the value of the book in his esteem. If the censor succeeds, he has done a great service for himself, as well as for the boy. He has broadened his own literary horizon, re- newed his youth and promoted a new fellowship with one of the uncrowned monarchs of the radi- ant future. The following suggestions may be of service: First too much reading, even of good books, is not advisable, for it will produce mental dys- pepsia. Some reading may be turned into study, on which a sympathetic and well-veiled examina- tion may be held; all reading should be wholesomely varied with work and play. Second after the story form of literature, bi- ography is the most attractive, and is, by all odds, the most valuable. A carefully selected list of the lives of the great men will bring him more benefit than any other equal amount of reading. This list may include the men who have made history 210 THAT KOY OF YOURS in the past and the men who are making it to-day. That is teaching history in its best form, for we cannot read the lives of men without learning what they did. Such a method will give con- tinuity to the boy's reading and insure its con- tinuance in useful directions. I count the biogra- phies I read in boyhood the best reading I did in those days. But biography is a field that has not been well and wisely worked in the interest of boys. A short life of each of our great epoch- making men, written for the purpose of interest- ing and instructing boys, would prove about the most valuable literary undertaking yet left un- done. Third health conditions must be guarded with care. Eyes are involved. Posture must be watched, for tuberculosis and neurasthenia may be incurred by a bad posture. He may undermine his health by neglect of exercise. Interest in an absorbing book may be accompanied by too great an expenditure of nerve force. Fourth keep in mind that his reading is trans- forming a human life, for the better or the worse. Prof. Huey says: "To completely analyse what we do, when we read, would almost be the acme of the psychologist's achievement, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate work- ings of the human mind as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable single per- formance that civilisation has learned in all its history. " HIS BEADING 211 Hypnotism, with its suggestions, is not more powerful than is a fascinating book to a boy. We are discovering the need of new literature for boys, books that deal with nature and with human life from the beginning, in an ethical yet enter- taining way. XXXIII HIS TEACHER His infatuation with school work is not always immediate and irremediable. Sometimes it comes just as his opportunity for going to school is vanishing and all the rest of his days he will have periods of penitence over his folly and will fre- quently wish the teacher, or his parents, had taken the "big stick" to him unflinchingly. Sometimes he never cares for what he has missed; but we seldom find that sort of a man. His teacher, as an essential part of the school system, may fall under the same reprobation till his period of in- corrigible antipathy to schools is over, and then that same teacher will rise into heroic stature be- fore his eyes. He may naturally take to school, teacher and all, asking no questions on that point, but plenty of them on other points. In that case he makes fair weather with parents, teacher, school board and the public generally. Such a good reputation so absolutely awaits any boy who goes after it in that way that we wonder how it ever fails to be a greater attraction to him than any amount of fun or self-will can be. But all the mysteries have 212 HIS TEACHER 213 not yet been solved, even with the assistance of psychology and pedagogy. Between these two extremes there is a golden and practicable mean into which a boy can often be guided, if the right kind of a teacher has the co- operation of the right kind of parents. The wrong kind of a teacher can succeed in giving the right kind of a boy a distaste for school and all that belongs to schools, while the right kind of a teacher can usually win the most obdurate and obvious opponents of school to an astonishing fondness for everything that even suggests a school. She does it through his fondness for her and she wisely makes use of some of his interests, as fun, constructive manual work, play in general, his gang, his chum, his collecting mania, saving money, music, nature, art, stories, and even his sweetheart. If he is managed in the right way, even though he is not yet an ideal boy, he may, at last, come to like the school for its own sake. Any teacher could afford to spend a lifetime in learn- ing how to manage boys. If the purpose of his school is to put knowledge in his mind and to train his powers through his effort to get possession of that knowledge, and then to give him complete possession of those powers along with the knowledge they have ac- quired, the teacher is sure to be able to establish a point of contact with him somewhere, provided she is worth retaining in the school. If all educa- tion comes through contact with persons, and boys 214 THAT BOY OF YOUES are always on the search for interesting person- alities, it ought not to take any teacher long to establish a happy contact with any boy who comes to school. The school bbard cannot always guarantee that every teacher will be popular with every child, every day, but they can do their best, and when- ever they find a hysterical, complaining pedagogue, who manages to keep a good working majority of the pupils in an irritated and rebellious frame of mind a good part of every day they ought to know how to relieve the situation. In order to be a success with him his teacher must regard him, and not the school, as the at- tractive subject. She is training him rather than working out an educational system. The teacher must also know how to get into co-operation with his parents. She must have a couple of eyes good for not seeing as well as seeing, an active child- element in her own nature, a hand that is fine as well as firm, and a spirit that is always fair and always friendly. These things would make her a paragon and such she ought to try to be at least. The boy will like her and show it in his own way, not as a little girl would, by putting his arms around her and telling her how he loves her. You never catch him at that. The terms in which he expresses his appreciation of her may not always be classical literature, but they convey his idea clearly. A boy I know speaks of his teacher, Miss A., as " dandy, " and even sometimes as " peachy." HIS TEACHEE 215 He can be attached to the school through his other interests as well as by the person who makes it attractive. Physical culture will grip him, if the school has a gymnasium, or even if it has not. The more of that physical culture he gets in the form of play the better. Manual training also will draw him, even if he never enters any of the crafts built on what he is taught to do. And this is true because it is not entirely a training of his hand and his eye, but of himself through his hand and eye. He is having a very good mental train- ing in colour and form and in adaptation of means to ends. He is also getting his executive func- tions started and ready for the demands of after years ; and he will often need the skill he is acquir- ing. It is useful to be able to be a blacksmith, or a carpenter, or an architect, when in a pinch, as well as a stenographer or bookkeeper. The American boy averages only four years in school before he is twelve, and not many after that age. It is hard to hold him. A natural dislike for school, the need of his services at home, the necessity of working to support the family and the distracting fascinations of money-getting all mili- tate against his completing the course. But the teacher may hold him at the breaking-up time in the ways indicated. He likes his studies all the better wherever the skilful teacher can utilise the general knowledge he already has and connect it with the activities that belong in the calling to which he aspires. In 216 THAT BOY OF YOUES fact, it seems possible to make many a study very attractive that way. Figures are used in engineer- ing; chemicals in photography; projectiles in war thus the dry details become fascinating. In- terest is the thing that secures education and makes memory active and reliable, kindles im- agination, and binds the school course to the com- ing career. His interests are various and ob- vious ; it would be strange if not one of them was discovered and utilised. The best thing his teacher does for him is what she does with him and through him. When she enters into the work she assigns, or guides him to choose for himself, and becomes his co-worker she reigns as queen in that school. When he knows her mind is travelling with his mind in its toilsome journey through the fields of knowl- edge, he learns to put her valuation on his work because he puts a high valuation on her. If she is wise enough to let him do a little dreaming, with her entire approbation, he is sure to think she is competent to guide his dreams into their em- bodiment in deeds. If his plans are of any in- terest to her and she will encourage him to tell about them, she has him on her side. If she is wise she will know that his dreams have as dis- tinct a place in fitting him for his future career as do his studies. Where vocational training is given, as is now being done in some places and will be done a great HIS TEACHER 217 deal more in the future, the teacher and he will have much more in common. The schools are now considering the whole child as at school, not his mind alone : we may expect a great deal more for the boy from that fact. Even personal prob- lems are within the teacher's observation, and he may be much assisted by frank talks, if she knows how to invite confidence and clear up dif- ficulties; and he may be unconsciously aided by a fine and directive attitude on her part. The irgument for vocational training for girls and boys seems complete: over fifty per cent, of the boys will make their living with their hands and almost all the girls will become housekeepers ; therefore, as the purpose of the school is to fit boys and girls for efficient lives, it should give them that voca- tional training. When the teacher knows the crises through which he passes in all his stages and struggles, in all their symptoms and suggestions, and gives him something positive rather than negative, makes wholesome things attractive and wrong things re- pulsive, encourages individuality and proves a good friend as well as a capable teacher, such work wins him forever. After a certain stage in the early teens, that teacher ought to be a man. I cannot close this chapter with better words than these from Dr. William De Witt Hyde : ' ' It is not of so much importance what a boy knows when he leaves school, as what he loves. The 218 THAT BOY OF YOUKS greater part of what he knows he will speedily forget. What he loves he will feed on. His hunger will prompt his efforts to increase his store." XXXIV HIS LONG APPRENTICESHIP FBOM the cradle to his career is a good long time, about twenty-five years, and there is seldom found a boy who relishes that long wait. It is not that he is jealous of the other animals for getting through growing and down to business so much sooner than he does, when he and they start out together kids, colts, cats, calves and puppies and he sees several generations of the same animal family make their entrances and exits while he is merely fighting his way to the stage. The lion and the tiger are mature at six, the horse earlier, the cow earlier still, the sheep at from one to two years ; the amoeba and other insects in a few days and some of them are born, mature, finish their lives and die, all in one day. This lightning change in them does not always stimulate his patience. He sees the vast opportunities before him and is sure they will all be gone by the time he gets a chance at them, and, anyway, it looks to him just the thing to be a grown man. There are a good many things he enjoys as a boy, but they are insignificant compared with the good times he ex- pects to have when he is grown and can show people how to do things. 219 220 THAT BOY OF YOUBS But if a boy proceeds more leisurely than the other animals, it is not time wasted, for when they are through he is just getting started on a career that will outlast the stars, a career of which the threescore and ten years of the life here are only the overture ; and, because they are only the over- ture and therefore to strike the theme of the whole eternal symphony, he has to have plenty of time to tune up, get his part and do some rehearsing. The elephant may outlive him, but he is closer akin to angel than to elephant ; the mud turtle may outlast him, but he is more like a skylark to wing his way into the infinite. It takes a long time to get ready for a long career. The greatest man the world has ever known took thirty years to prepare for only three years of work, but all the ages to come were to be affected by those three years. The very great- est man in all the centuries before that matchless One did his life work in forty years, becoming a nation's leader and the world's law-giver, but he could not have done it if he had not had eighty years in which to prepare for it. Goethe wrote the latter part of his " Faust" in old age, but it was the ripe flower of his many years of culture. The longer infancy is the chief explanation of the longer age of man, for it secures to him both the bodily and the psychological requisites of the longer life, while it is just the chance he needs to get himself ready to make it an efficient life. It must also be remembered that when he. is HIS LONG APPRENTICESHIP 221 born the boy is lower down in the scale than al- most any other animal, no higher than the kan- garoo and the possum, and it takes a longer time to bring him up from such a depth. What little mind an animal has is about as bright at the start as it ever will be, and soon knows all it will ever know. A baby not only knows nothing, but has nothing to know with, and has to develop the instrument with which he will do all his knowing. An animal's little group of instincts are wide awake in a few days, while a boy's mind is waking up all his life, with still more waking ahead of him. An animal learns his little round of tricks in a few days, but a boy has to study it out and ac- quire skill and aptitudes. An animal's job is simple and small ; a boy has the task of becoming not only master of himself, but of the world and its forces. The development of a child is one of the greatest social processes we know anything about, and from that standpoint, John Fiske has given the long human infancy its scientific interpretation. All that time he is doing things, through the things which are done for him ; and what he does in that way, is perhaps the very best thing he ever does. It seems that he is the one for whom things are done, but he is doing for others a work that will tell on them and society for all time to come. Their long and unrecorded nurture of his life is the finest discipline they ever have. Perhaps he is achieving his very greatest task in fulfilling that 222 THAT BOY OF YOURS long, and often tedious, apprenticeship. Interest centres on him as an individual, but we come to see that the most striking thing about him is his social significance. He becomes at once a factor in the industrial and social world. He is being trained to become a part of the social organism, and all that his life will mean to other people is being prepared for in those slow years. It is really phenomenal how the interest of the family and community centres in the child, and not the less so if the child is a boy. The benevolence and beneficence which he elicits from them, are the finest fruits of character. He socialises them as they take him into their lives and as they be- come aware of each other in their common min- istry to him. His most marked contribution is to the family solidarity, but that does not limit his influence. He promotes parental unity. The planning and working and loving bestowed on a common object, as fascinating as he is, produces a unity with an element that nothing else can supply. And if there should be in them tendencies toward divi- sions, this may divert their minds and prevent permanent cleavage ; by the time they have taken him through from infancy to manhood, caring and planning for him and giving him an education and a start in life, the habits of co-operation have be- come fixed enough to carry them along without his further aid. By that time he has trained them in self -discipline, for many a father is kept from a HIS LONG APPRENTICESHIP 223 less worthy life by the thought of his boy, or his little girl. There is a sociality as between the parents on the one side and the children on the other; also between the children themselves; and nature has given the boy time to make good in both tasks. Other children and other homes are the beneficiaries of his fine opportunity for a long service, in a social way. He has time to give his parents a very thorough general training which a shorter childhood would not allow training in power of reasoning and foresight, knowledge of human nature, adaptation of means to ends, and love in all its elements of patience, tenderness and self-control. He has time to grow into comradeship with them by de- grees and thus furnish something very valuable to their lives. He has time, also, for a usefulness which not only supplies them aid but is valuable training for further usefulness, when he gets away from them. But his long childhood is just the thing for his own education, not only in a general way, but in some of his powers especially needed in the future. One is altruism ; and a long period of service, for which there is no scale of rewards, is the best way for him to learn it. He grows in the power of choice, as, at the right moment, he takes himself over, so that by the time he passes from under his parent's direction he has himself in control, with far-reaching relation- ship established. He has his moral habits formed 224 THAT BOY OF YOUES and fixed by the time he must face moral issues and decide them alone. Let him learn the way to choose while he has assistance in choosing; the way to 4;hink, while there is some supervision of his thinking. Let him be taught that the long childhood is preparing the material for many memories, for, as in after years he looks back over that long period, the varied interests of the epoch-making experience of childhood, he will get entertainment and in- struction for his own life and the lives of others, including, perhaps, his own boy. Let the boy be happy rather than grieved, because of his long apprenticeship. XXXV HIS COLLEGE LIFE EVERY boy is entitled to a college education, if it is in the power of his parents and friends to enable him to secure it, or if it is in his power to obtain it in spite of their inability. There are separate and combined reasons why this is his in- alienable right. One is that a very large proportion of the young men of to-day are availing themselves of the un- precedented opportunities for taking a college course and college men are becoming much more numerous as a class, each year, while non-college men are growing less numerous, comparatively speaking; the former list will enlarge still more rapidly, in the future, with the going of large fortunes and myriads of small gifts into the build- ing of colleges and universities, while the class of non-college men will shrink in a still more rapid proportion. Whatever advantage there is in be- ing in the rapidly increasing rather than in the relatively diminishing class the boy should have. Whatever disadvantage he would have in being in competition with increasing numbers of college men he should be shielded from. The disad- vantages are increasing each year and by the time 225 226 THAT 'BOY OF YOUES he is out in the field of action he will need all the help of a college training more than young men now in the field need it. The college does at least these three things for him: It trains him in all the elements of man- hood, especially the mental; it imparts to him a great deal of knowledge which may prove very useful some day, especially since the modern system of practical education is invading the col- leges; it establishes certain relationships, both with individuals and institutions, which may be- come the most valuable equipment of his whole life. These three things a college will do for him, unless something is wrong with him, or the college, or both. Of course a trained mind and manhood is the essential thing. If he should forget all the knowl- edge he acquired at college and only retain the added power to think and gain knowledge which he has, as a result of his college training, the de- veloped mind would be more than worth all the sacrifices he made to get it. With that mind he will be far ahead of what he would have been, if he had not gone to college. Statistics partially show these great advantages. There are some callings he could hardly have any chance to enter at all without college experience. Out of every seven hundred and fifty men reaching the age of twenty-one, only one of them has been a college graduate. Now, if a college course has no effect on a man 's promotion in public life, then only one HIS COLLEGE LIFE 227 in seven hundred and fifty of our public men should be a college graduate. But what are the facts? The colleges furnish thirty per cent, of all our congressmen, forty six per cent, of the sena- ators, fifty per cent, of our vice-presidents, sixty- five per cent, of our presidents, about eighty per cent, of our supreme court judges and eighty-five per cent, of the chief justices. The figures are even better by the last census. There are some vocations he could scarcely enter without it, and if he did he would always be crippled for lack of such training ; and there is no vocation in which he would not be improved by a trained mind. The occupations requiring a knowledge of electricity and chemistry are grow- ing more numerous and firms employing men give the preference to college graduates. President Thwing of Western Eeserve says that firms in Cleveland speak in advance for all their gradu- ates, in those departments. Cornell graduates seldom have to wait for employment. These two colleges are referred to as examples not as excep- tions. On the basis of averages, someone has fig- ured out that each boy loses $22000.00 in his life- time by not going on to college. If he should ever be thrown out of his chosen work his trained mind would be better able to meet the emergency and take up something else; he would have more resources to fall back on and would feel more resourceful. In truth the college course may bring out some latent force or aptitude 228 THAT BOY OF YOUES which, otherwise, would slumber on and leave his life entirely unaffected by it, but which would be- come a dominant and directive force through his whole career. He may never know what he is best fitted for till he gets himself and his powers drawn out and trained. A college course will equip him with some knowl- edge of the most valuable kind, knowledge that is sure to come to his aid in times of need. All of us have thought some things we were compelled to learn were useless, save as they furnished good exercise, like the drill of a gymnasium, and we thought something more interesting would be just as good for a drill. But even such dry and im- practical matters as logarithms and cosigns and the binomial theorem may suddenly come to a man's aid. No one is wise enough to know what he is going to be doing all the days of his life and no one can know what he will not want. Our col- leges are now offering everything that will be needed as a start to the boy whose eyes are wide open. The physical sciences have superseded some of the studies that were thought impractical by the very practical. In taking a college course, the boy establishes relationships which may come to be the most valu- able result of the course. He will, in after years, number among his friends men who will be in the eye of the nation and perhaps in the eye of the world presidents, senators, governors, diplo- mats, or great lawyers, doctors, merchants, or HIS COLLEGE LIFE 229 preachers. These may lift the boy to his success in life. Even the professors in college may be- come his friends when he is through and is on an equal footing with them. The boy will be con- nected up with his college all his life in a way to be benefited by it, and he will find it a channel through which he can do a great deal of that good which we are coming to see a man must do, if he would be worthy as a man. The interests of his alma mater become his interests and they open up social and philanthropic opportunities of the rar- est kind. Any boy can get an education, if he is deter- mined to have it, even though he hasn't a cent of money. All kinds of opportunities have been thought out and arranged for such a boy. In fact, those who have founded our colleges may almost )e said to have had him in view, in piling up endow- ments and creating scholarships and fellowships and providing remunerative employment for him. In his own community there are lawyers and doc- tors and teachers and business men and ministers who have made their way unaided and they are a constant object lesson and encouragement to him. He can get work as janitor, or waiter, or dish-washer, or in trimming lawns or clerking oil Saturdays, or tutoring, or driving autos, or car- riages, or aeroplanes. Education obtained that way has many advantages. The boy knows what it means; he knows its worth; he has put forth determined effort, and the culture of the determi- 230 THAT BOY OF YOUES nation is vital in education; he has learned to adapt means to ends. There is a whole group of manly qualities brought into action in such a struggle independence, industry, self-assertion, true pride of character, as contrasted with false pride, and sympathy with those who make the same fight. Other things being equal, he will be worth a great deal more to society and to himself, if he has to get his education by struggle. But if he hasn't that advantage of struggle with ad- versity, he should be sent to college anyhow. But what college should he go to ? I think I can name about four characteristics that ought to be looked for and identified in the college. Bear in mind that the whole boy is being trained and not his mind alone. We have gotten beyond the old heresy that he goes to college solely for his mental, and into society for his social, and to church for his religious, training. He is to get all of them wherever he goes. Efficiency, ideas, which means atmosphere, personal relationships and oppor- tunities for action these are the things to look for in a college. We needn't pause for a single word on the first requisite, for a college that doesn't do college work will get an accurate rating by the public. The matter of ideas, or atmosphere, is easily over- looked. A college that lessens a boy's respect for things religious is undermining the foundation on which it stands. There is not a college or a high school or a university in our country that would HIS COLLEGE LIFE 231 be in existence, if it had not been for Christianity. Even Girard College is not an exception. He who said, "I am the truth," and has been stimulating people to live by the truth, has also stimulated us to search for the truth in all fields of research, and to teach the truth to growing minds. The atmosphere of truth and reverence and religion is more important to the boy than any amount of truths he may learn. There is such a thing as learning truths at the expense of truthfulness. There is another thing no one has the right to for- get: the schools of our country were founded by religious denominations and even our public schools had a distinctly religious origin. The edu- cational work of the United States, save that of the public schools, was done by the Christian col- leges, till the era of the great state universities a few years ago. The personal relationships to be established have already been spoken of. The kind of teachers is an essential matter. The institutional relationships to be established are not always a consideration with boys, or even with their parents. If it seems reasonably certain that he is to be a member of a given denomination of Christians, it is important that he attend a col- lege of that denomination. Something might be gained in the way of breadth, by attending a college of another body of Christians, but much would be lost. He will always owe a duty to his own denomination; he will also be under obliga- tion to support his alma mater. If the two sets 232 THAT BOY OF YOUES of duties conflict, it may so divide his limited abilities as to impair his usefulness in both re- lationships. But if the two sets of duties coincide, it enables him to serve both his church and his alma mater with success. Another consideration in favour of going to his own church school is that the advantages of culture, which his people had and which he indirectly enjoyed, came, as a rule, through the sacrifices of the church of his fathers. He is already too much of a debtor to his church to ignore its schools. He must be encouraged to take plenty of time to secure a broad, general, basal training, before he attempts to build the special vocational struc- ture on it. He has plenty of time. The oppor- tunities are getting better every year and if he should rush out now, he might miss some of the best that will come on about the time he should be fully ready. Every calling is requiring a more cultured man. Farming is going to be scientific in the future and farmers are likely to become about our most cultured people, in the years to come. Artisans and mechanics need to be men of culture. The home must keep in touch with him, while at college, through a knowledge of what he is study- ing, of his companionships and of his standing in classes, among his friends and with his teachers. It is due both to the parents and to the boy to say that, if he doesn't succeed in getting a college education, before going into his career, it is not HIS COLLEGE LIFE 233 to be considered for a moment as a ground for discouragement. There never were such oppor- tunities before for taking special vocational courses of study. Correspondence schools, night schools, summer schools and university extension classes have been devised to aid him in making up for the earlier neglect or lack of opportunity. To be sure he will be at a disadvantage, but he has a chance and many a man has gone on and taken an academic degree while supporting a growing family. It is a struggle to be avoided if possible, but to be welcomed if inevitable. In addition, he lives in a time when more knowl- edge of a popular and scientific nature is in circu- lation and held in solution in the atmosphere than there ever was before, while books, papers and magazines are within the reach of every man. Any one who wants to become learned in any one line can do so, though he will always be at a dis- advantage if he fails to get the discipline of a thorough education in his early years. Perhaps it is the most important thing to re- member that it is the boy himself who is to be trained, through his powers, and that training and discipline and culture are to go on till the end of his life. The chief value of a college course is to develop in him the power to live his life and do his work and get him into a habit that will prove lifelong. XXXVI HIS VOCATION IP he gets his right vocation at the right time it will be the right settlement of a question that ranks among the most solemn things in life. If he gets into the wrong vocation, it will be like wearing a pair of shoes that do not fit, but insist on pinching and rubbing and irritating, and he is not likely to have ability to change to the right thing. But he must not enter his calling till he has gotten beyond the boy stage. Then why con- sider the matter in a discussion of boys at all? Well, for two reasons, surely. He is getting him- self ready for it unconsciously, and his rulers are deliberately and intelligently preparing him for it. At least they are if they are true to him. He is moving right on steadily toward his call- ing, when he has a chance to let himself out and to engage in some preliminary preparatory callings. His first vocation is play and that he pushes with a devotion worthy of him. He cannot have made a better choice, and you pronounce him a success. You say he will be heard from yet, and you base your conclusions on the fact that he has already been heard from mightily. That preparatory vocation is quickly succeeded 234 HIS VOCATION 235 by another, also play, in which he is busier than ever. For he has now added something else, go- ing to school, and perhaps running on errands and helping about the house, or the school, or with the horses, or in the field. All along he is getting ready for his life work, without knowing it, and without showing it, save to trained and penetrat- ing eyes. Another preliminary vocation follows soon still play. But this time it is team work. His social instincts are at work and the sentiment of otherism is getting hold of him. On through the gang period and into the chum period it extends, and then some definite plans are likely to be form- ulated. All through those periods he has been dreaming of being all sorts of things, and he has been doing some things. He has been dreaming of being cowboy, lion-hunter and the whole line of things familiar to those who are familiar with boys. He has been doing such things as peddling papers, or working on a farm in summer, or being an errand boy, or raising vegetables on shares. He is really doing valuable preparatory work for body and brain and heart and hand. But you notice that he seldom becomes just what he first wanted to become, and he seldom continues in what he starts to do. There are reasons for it. He is simply doing whatever he can get his hands on, in order to have some fun or make some money to do what he would like to do. Besides, he is learning by experience what not to do. And we 236 THAT BOY OF YOUES must not forget two facts, that his strongest apti- tudes may be still dormant, and that he has not yet the power of final choice. When he has made his preliminary experiments, has found those deep and determining aptitudes and has developed his power of definite and deci- sive choice, then he will have very little difficulty in finding his calling. He cannot well make a mistake and, if he does, it will he a mistake that can easily be corrected. The study of vocations was never so thorough as at the present time. The public schools are likely to do some training of that kind. At any rate, the manual training has vocational, as well as intellectual and ethical, value. That is doing much to acquaint boys with their own aptitudes. He might fit into any one of a group of related callings, like building and contracting, milling and the like, because the sense of the mechanical is dominant. If he is a barterer he can trade in al- most any line. Or he might be a dentist, or drug- gist, or a doctor, and make no mistake in either case. Any one of kindred professions might be suitable for him. He may have to have experi- ence in one before settling in a closely related call- ing. His talents and taste must harmonise with his trade. It must not be supposed that he came to his call- ing in a fortuitous way, or solely by self -direction. It had to be, in the final decision, his own choice, for it must ever be a choice and not a coercion. HIS VOCATION 237 But others were preparing him for the momentous decision. They were watching over his play, giv- ing steady direction, tactful correction and con- stant protection, and the subtle power of making wise choices was growing in the lad. They were preparing his body by wholesome food and the right exercise, in work and systematic training, as well as play. They were developing his mind till its more hidden and tardy talents should come forth to give their voice in the council chamber. In doing so, they sent him through as thorough courses in school and college and university as possible, so that he would not fail of any needed equipment. For they knew, also, that the boy with the well-trained mind has a distinct advan- tage over the rest of the boys. If they want him to become president of the United States, they know that his chances, according to the way it has already been going, are not nearly as good with- out a college education as with it, while he has a still poorer chance to become a supreme court judge and almost as poor to become a United States senator. He has only about one-ninth as good a chance in the usual callings. He should also be taught a trade, as the Jews used to teach their boys. The old rabbi was not far wrong in saying that he who did not teach his boy a trade did the same as teach him to steal. A trade gives one useful knowledge, skill, sympathy with toilers, and may provide for some unfore- seen, yet very serious, emergency. Our manual 238 THAT BOY OF YOUES training schools are preparing our boys for their callings. Those who have charge of the boy must help him get a technical training for his calling, by sending him to school or directing his reading and teaching him how to observe. The boy will need an avocation, too, a side call- ing, in which he may find recreation after work and reinforcement for work a means for utilis- ing the by-products of his main calling. Usually that takes care of itself. It may be music if he is not a professional musician ; art, if he is a business man; literature, as Lubbock and Stedman and others have made it ; it may be one or two of many things. He may very profitably take over the many callings by groups, so that he may give his tastes a chance to be conscious of themselves, the me- chanical, industrial, science, art, agricultural, transportational, professional groups. This may prove a great assistance to him. There is one other element in selecting his call- ing and that is the presence and plans of Him who gave us the raw materials for all our callings and gave us the aptitudes for them, who still exercises a providence over us and has His personal plans for us. The boy must be taught to respect the fact of providence and to co-operate with Him whose will is working constantly and personally in guiding us here. Yet he must also make his own choice. Learn what the boy is fitted for; train him in HIS VOCATION 239 that direction; bring him within the influence of the occupation for which you consider him best fitted; step back and let him decide it; if he makes a mistake don't allow him to grow discouraged, but patiently work with him till he has found his place. XXXVII HIS RELIGION SOME people feel sorry for the boy who is not a tough, or at least an unfortunate, one whom the professional students call a "delinquent." The delinquent seems to get most of the kind thoughts, the kind words and the flowers from an increasing number of people, while the real first-class boy who does somewhat as he ought to do is passed by. The " delinquent ' ' holds the centre of the stage. Yet there would not be many delinquents if we only knew how hungry almost every boy is for the best things, provided they are brought to him in such a way that he can take hold of them. If one's religion is the attitude he takes toward the invisible Father above, then that, as Carlyle says, is the most important thing about anybody, even a boy. And a boy's grandmother has no more reason for having that right attitude than he has, nor as much. Nor is it easier for her than for him. It is the same religion in both, even as they may eat the same food at the same table. But in her, that food reappears in a bent body, soft, baby- like flesh, beautiful grey hair and extensive wrin- 240 HIS RELIGION 241 kles, while in him it becomes an erect little body, knotted muscles, stubby hair and smooth skin. They get their religion in the same way the same loving Father, the same gracious Saviour, the same instructing and inspiring Bible; but in one it reappears as grandmother, in the other as boy. His religion should come in a most natural way. In fact it should be his vital breath. He finds himself in a physical world and must adjust him- self to it, with food and water and air and exer- cise, and he does it by directing and correcting himself, though of course with suitable assist- ance. He does this because he feels his limita- tions, has a sense of need. That is what we call physical adjustment. He is in a world of truth that his intellect must get hold of and so there must be a constant intel- lectual adjustment. In like ways he adjusts him- self to his social world. In each case he has a hunger, a sense of need, an inner propulsion. He is also in a world of moral forces and of spiritual existence. They appeal to him. It is his sense of need that leads him into a peaceful and loving relation to God and under the influ- ence of that relationship he lives his religious life ; but he does it as a boy. A boy has a hunger for God, as he has for food and friends and fun, but he does not always know what it means. He has the same taint and bias that the rest of us have and the same disinclination to all the pain he may experience in the readjustment, but it is only the 242 THA^T BOY OF YOUES process, and not the peace to which it leads, that he dislikes. He is just as ready as the rest of us in fact, more ready to give up what is wrong and accept what is right and to worship and serve God. He may have a much more acute sense of need and may more eagerly lay hold of the help that comes from the Father above. He has all the material for a religious life, if he is only helped to see the meaning of his hunger and to secure its gratifica- tion. But he must be religious in his own way. It will be wholly personal devotion to the person of his Lord and to those with whom he is connected. Therefore, it is social. No boy is religious to him- self. He is a hero worshipper, and this instinct is dominant. The "gang" instinct is a part of the same spirit. His divine Master is more di- vine and lovely when he can regard Him as one of them, and interested in him and his friends. It is not abstract but concrete truth that he likes truth in the form of persons who appeal to him. His religion is therefore emotional. It fires the feelings and the imagination. In original and spontaneous ways his feelings express themselves, but usually through his actions. His religion is active. Interest and activity are the laws of his nature. He gets it ingrained by what it leads him to do. It is not a fence around him, but a force within him. He is not a doc- trinaire; he is both a dreamer and a doer. Let HIS EELIGION 243 him have something to love and to learn and to do and he is happy. He is ready to show his feelings in extravagant ways, sometimes scenic, always sin- cere. He is interested less in God's attributes than in His actions, more in deeds than in doc- trines. He is a partisan and is ready to stand by his own religious crowd till he expires. His religion is militant: something to do and something to dare. The idea, recently expressed in some few books, that he is so very militant he must first have a fight with any newcomer in his Sunday-school class before he and the rest of the class will welcome him, is untrue in fact and a libel on his nature as well as on his religion. He is militant, but it is not of the physical kind, not nec- essarily. He does like a contest and when he is truly religious he wants to buckle on sword and go forth to smite sins, private and public, and liberate their victims. Let him think of his faults and sins as horrible giants and he will make war on them. He often fights the good fight of faith when we know nothing of it. His susceptibility to religious influences and impressions comes at intervals, with the awaken- ing of each new power, like the will and the con- science and the social impulses. The sense of need which he then experiences seems to make him look out from himself to a power higher and bet- ter than the human. It seems that his conver- sion ought to come at the very first of those awak- enings. It is one of the structural needs of the 244 THAT BOY OF YOUES boy, not like the need for education, but more like that for food or water. If he is not converted then, it means religious abnormality and may mean degeneration. The rise of the sex instincts is a time for the most active religious sentiments, because that is the time for the perception of far-reaching rela- tionships, both to man and to the Infinite; also, because it is a chaotic time, when the foundations sometimes seem to give way beneath him. That is the time of all others to establish him, in a di- rect, personal communion with God. It is the time when he is most susceptible to God's touch, when he is in the greatest peril and when his whole future life will be most powerfully affected by such an experience. Students of the psy- chology of religion are saying that conversion is an adolescent phenomenon. It doesn't come nec- essarily, as the voice changes and the beard grows, but it is the time when his own natural processes make it fitting and needed and relatively easy. If he is not converted then it is not impossible. He will still have a religion, but it is likely to be the religion of self and he will miss the vital knowledge of his Heavenly Father and His chil- dren. He may be converted in after years, but he will have suffered irreparable losses. No one can find rhetoric too strong to set forth the needs of his nature for a true religious life at that time. His religion is personal, emotional, active and militant. It must be presented to him having HIS EELIGION 245 those elements, and must never be spoken of as something abnormal to him. It is personal in the sense of being social. The person, through whose touch he is awakened to the new life, will seem scarcely less than divine as the boy's admiration sees him. A boy who was in the London Polytechnic under the famous Quentin Hogg went astray, in after years. One day a teacher in the "Tech." met him and in- quired how he was doing. His reply was that he often fell, but he carried a picture of Hogg in his pocket and that often helped him to overcome temptation. A boy 's religion leads to companion- ships and the growing ties that will be like cables binding him to safe moorings. The food for his religious life is in the Bible and it is marvellously adapted to minister to the essential characteristics of his Christian nature. He not only has a memory to retain it, but he has an appreciation of it. Its geography may be made attractive and more so as he tries to repro- duce its features with drawings of his own. The world's greatest heroes are portrayed in its pages and he may learn to enjoy them more highly than any other heroes. The most exciting battles are told and they are battles in behalf of righteous- ness. His religious life may be nourished by biog- raphy, especially that of men who have been noble and great in unselfish achievement, at home as well as on mission fields. He can easily be led 246 THAT BOY OF YOUES into friendship with people of religions natures. The leader of his religions life will have mnch to do with its character one who loves the Bible and knows how to make it homely and vivid, one who understands him and knows how to direct and utilise his sentiments. He may, very easily, be taught that the whole life is to be religious, even when he is on the athletic field and in the gymnasium and in the school. Play is all the better for piety. At the time when he most needs friendships, religion will establish them most surely and happily. He is capable of taking a useful part in religious services. It has sometimes been claimed that he ought never to testify in meetings, on the ground that he will be artificial and learn to use forms of expression that will not and cannot mean any- thing. The remedy for it is to teach him the meaning of Christian testimony and encourage him to give it, in right ways and at suitable times. He is capable of having a wholesome and impor- tant part in meetings of different kinds. The things that come most easily are ushering and waiting on others, though he is entirely capable of participating in the devotional exer- cises. Of course, his religion is primarily a problem for his parents to solve, but it is also the problem of the church. The purpose of the church is to save both the soul and the life of the boy, the part of the life that goes before, as well as the part HIS RELIGION 247 that comes after, his conversion. The churches have done much for him. They are doing much in providing interesting preaching for all the peo- ple. We must not disparage that and thereby be- little the gospel or the preachers of the gospel. It's a mistake to suppose he doesn't enjoy the regular Sunday morning services of the church. If he doesn't, in many cases, it will be found to be caused by the assumption that he doesn't, which he has heard till he imagines it is true. He has been cheated out of his birthright of enjoy- ment. We owe it to him to inform him he is miss- ing something that was gotten up for him as well as for others, something which no one else can enjoy quite as well as he can. Then, when he comes to church, we have to make good, by put- ting all those elements, which his nature requires, into the sermon and everything else. We shall likely find that the rest of the people have been longing for the same thing. The musical fea- tures, the fervent prayers and the fervid elo- quence appeal to him. When I was a boy, the fervent and famous Eev. Thomas Eambaut preached several times at our country church, and no one could ever express the rapture with which I hung on his words, though I understood very little of what he said. Truth is, a boy ought to hear a great many things that he can't under- stand, though they will put him to sleep or give him the fidgets if they do not excite his wonder and admiration. If he sees and feels the preach- 248 THAT BOY OF YOUES er's passion for truth, his sentiment of brother- hood and that nameless thing we call magnetism, these things will be effective in firing his imagina- tion and fashioning his ideals. Yet much can be brought within the comprehension of the boy and, when the preacher does it, he wins the older peo- ple besides. But something more than preaching is to be done by the church. It must lead the boy in the nurture of his Christian life in the three requi- sites for all growth food, air and work. That life is to be nurtured by communion with God. No better figure of speech can be employed to de- scribe the relation of prayer to the sustaining of the religious life than this: "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, the Christian's native air," and that will always be true. The church must nurture his prayer life by her meetings for prayer adapted to his stage of growth, by the prayers of her Sabbath services and by positive teachings about prayer. The figure of food expresses well one of the serv- ices of the Bible to the Christian, though it also is a "sword" and it is "light" for the steps, as well as food. For all these purposes the church is to equip his mind with the contents of the Bible. It may do this in classes, as in the Sunday-school and in the use of the Bible in the ordinary serv- ices. It is my definite judgment that the very reading of the Bible, in the regular services, may be made an illuminating commentary and a strong HIS RELIGION 249 incentive to the people to read it for them- selves. The culture of his life through Christian work is attempted in the Sunday-school, through the organisation of classes for work and in other groups, as clubs and bands, in which use can be made of all the aptitudes and instincts found at his various stages of growth. His interest and efficiency in social service, in benevolence toward the unfortunate, and in missions grows astonish- ingly, when it is accurately cultivated. Almost every Sunday-school can give vital assistance to parents in the culture of the boy in those direc- tions. Two plain facts must never be forgotten. One is that obedience to the earthly father trains him in a respect for the heavenly Father's will, and in obedience to it. Lofty earthly friendships make it easier to know his best Friend. It follows that the father who fails to exact true obedience from him is as unnatural as the one who denies all re- sponsibility for his religious training. If the duty of supplying him with what his life needs is involved in parenthood, then the parents are pri- marily responsible for his religious life, till he is capable of taking it in charge himself. That is as much involved in parenthood as responsibility for bread and clothes and education and a start in life. The other fact is that a distinct and accurate plan for his religious culture is as essential as for his physical or mental culture, at whatever ex- 250 THAT BOY OF YOUES pense of time and money and labour. Money spent in equipping him for the life that is at the heart of his whole nature will prove the best spent money of all. No amount of trouble should be spared in bring- ing him under the vitalising and directive control of Christ, humanity's Head, without whom the boy will lead a headless life. That directive Head will inspire his ambitions, purify them and then grat- ify them. Contact with Christ will make him in- dustrious, for it will give him a deathless devo- tion to the tasks that duty puts into his hands; it will make him honest, and "the honest man though ne'er so poor is king o' men for a' that"; it will make him magnanimous and sympathetic, so that the successes and joys, or the failures and sorrows of another will be his; it will make him superior to the ills of poverty or lowly or unfor- tunate birth ; it will make him brave, to meet any kind of danger or duty. That boy and the Man Christ Jesus must be brought together, if it takes every foot of ground you own, every head of stock you possess, every shelf of goods in your store, every moment of your precious time and every ruddy drop that is dis- tilled through your loving heart. He will never cease to be. A broken life is an eternal horror ; a perfected life is the sublimest object on earth and surpassed only by his glorious Friend and Mas- ter. THE END E T y-AST DATE *'.oo THE 464768 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY