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