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 "I'm not working for grades," I hear boys say repeatedly. "I don't believe grades show much about a fellow's work."

Fathers, too, echo the same sentiments, but never so far as I can now recall, when their sons were getting anything creditable in the way of grades. It was the defense of their son's commonplace work which they were throwing up. It was another case of the fox who, when he saw that he could not reach the grapes, consoled himself by declaring them sour. It would be quite as sensible and convincing an argument, it seems to me, for a runner to say, "I don't care what time I make in the race; it doesn't seem to me that time means anything when a fellow's in a race. Just so one gets around the track a certain number of times is all that is necessary;" or for a base ball player to declare, "I don't count much on the base hits or the runs a man makes; I went to bat just as many times as any one did."

High grades are an indication of accomplishment; they show, usually, correct thinking, logical arrangement, and a grasp of fundamentals. Sometimes, it is true, they are the result of dishonest methods, or of a well-trained memory, but such cases are the exception and not the rule. The low grade, in general, suggests the commonplace student who is either slow in his thinking processes or unwilling to work. No one should be satisfied to do poorly. Every business man, every professional man, every boy in high school ought to be ambitious to excel in his special line of


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 endeavor. It is not enough just to come out even at the end of the year or just to get by at the examination. One should have pride enough to be eager to be as good as the best.

I have been a teacher for a good many years and I know that the great body of teachers want their students to do well, and are as proud as the boys themselves when their students do attain scholastic distinction. The teacher who takes delight in seeing his students fail can occasionally be found, but only rarely, I am sure.

As I was walking home to lunch during examination time I came upon one of our instructors. He was dragging himself along very slowly and looking the picture of gloom. He is at best not a hilarious person, and he has the reputation of being a rather hard taskmaster in his classes and one who takes a certain pleasure in seeing the downfall of the unambitious student.

"What's on your mind, Fred?" I asked.

"I haven't slept well the last few nights," he admitted. "A lot of my boys haven't done well on the examinations, and I can't see why. I hate to flunk them. The fact is I've read some of the papers three or four times trying to find enough in them to pass the fellows. I'm late now in handing in my grades, and I'm just trying to determine what I ought to do."

I laughed. I am sure not one of his students would have believed me if I had told them that Professor Frederick Brown, the cold-blooded, hard-hearted instructor who

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 took such delight in flunking every one possible, was lying awake of nights trying to devise some honest way to pass the boys; but that is what really happens more often than we imagine. Any good teacher wants his students to do well; any ambitious boy wants to get good grades.


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Every boy has leisure—much more, often, than he thinks. There are the hours during the day when no tasks are set, the weeks of the summer vacation when there is frequently nothing definite regularly to occupy his time, and there are the long winter evenings when even study will not suffice to take up all his available time. More often than otherwise he is left to himself during these hours and days of leisure, and what he does to occupy the time affects materially both his present and future happiness and his character.

One of our most respected Southern colleges has, among other customs, an unwritten tradition that the young fellow just out of high school and entering college should not be found loafing around the "Corner," a well-known place with its own particular attractions and allurements as well as its own particular dangers. The reason for this restriction, if a reason were necessary, is, no doubt, that it is not thought good for a young boy to begin his college career by cultivating the habit of loafing on street corners and picking up the uncertain acquaintances wont to congregate in such places; it is even worse for a high school boy so to occupy his time.

If any one in our town wanted to find Bert, if he were not in school or at home, he was as certain to be located


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 at the pool hall as his father on Sunday morning was sure to be found at church. Bert knew no other recreation; it was his particular indoor sport, and though he developed no skill in pool to speak of, he was quite content to spend his money and waste his time in shooting the balls into a pocket. He has no other recreation today. He is not unique in any way. If, out of his working hours, you are looking for any boy with whom you are acquainted there is quite likely to be some particular corner where he leans against the wall, some definite place which draws him, some sport which makes for him a regular and an irresistible appeal, a mandolin, or a golf club, or a billiard cue that drops readily into his hand. As I go down town every day after my work is done, I can usually run in to the same old loafers talking politics or whittling the store boxes that cumber the sidewalk, the same young boys doing nothing in the same places or kidding the girls that pass by on the street.

A certain amount of leisure is necessary for everyone, man or boy. All work and no play not only makes Jack a dull boy, but it retards his development, it sours his disposition, and it very likely turns him into a pretty irritable and unpleasant companion. No one can work all the time without reducing his efficiency, and without wearing out his nervous system. A little vacation, even if it is only an hour or two in the woods or a half day fishing at the river, sends one back to his work rested and with more vim and more interest and enthusiasm. I have no doubt that a good part of the purpose of the creator when he inaugur-


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 caraway-seed, and never afterward did she reach even that low pitch of violence; for from that mild, forward droop of the head with which he received the mental lunge she realized suddenly that this was no pretense and that something as impassable as death lay between them. Thereafter his proceedings evoked no comment but suffering. There was nothing to say when all day, save for those hours of the afternoon that Margaret spent with him, he sat like a blind man waiting for his darkness to lift. There was nothing to say when he did not seem to see our flowers, yet kept till they rotted the daffodils which Margaret brought from the garden that looked like an allotment.

So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, face downward on a sofa, with one limp arm dangling to the floor, or protruding stiff feet in fantastic slippers from the end of her curtained bed; and I tried to make my permanent wear that mood


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 ated the custom of working six days and resting the seventh was to forestall some fool man who would probably start the custom of working all the time and so eliminate vacations and reduce the general efficiency of mankind. Asa class, we Americans have too few leisure hours.

Of course growing boys need more leisure time than do other people. They are only beginning to develop concentration, their bodies tire, and they grow weary very soon of doing one thing, and so need a change; their high-strung nervous systems need relaxation, and they are helped in the development of self-reliance by being left for a considerable time to do as they please. One has only to see the pinched, white, tired faces of the children who are ground down by long hours of toil to realize how it dwarfs and stunts and discourages a child to have no recreation, to have no time in which he may do as he pleases. The boy with no leisure is robbed of his youth; and youth at best is all too short.

It is really astonishing, however, if one has never before done so, to discover just how many hours in a day or a week or a month one has at his own disposal—in fact just how much time one wastes, or idles away, or uses for one's own pleasure or recreation; and boys have far more than other and older people. A boy came to see me not long ago who was complaining because he had so much work to do and so little time in which to do it, so much drudgery and so little leisure in which to enjoy himself. His was the common complaint of young boys.


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 "I haven't a minute," was his assertion.

"Won't you keep a record for the next week," I asked him, "of exactly how you spend the twenty-four hours of the day, and bring it back to me?"

I gave him directions as to how the time should be divided: so much for meals, so much for sleeping, so much for school work and study, and so on, and required him to account specifically for the entire twenty-four hours of the day.

"I guess I'm not working as much as I thought," he said when, at the end of the specified time, he came back again. "I'm a good deal more of a loafer than I should have been willing to admit."

His record showed, as yours will quite likely if you will take the trouble to investigate, that nearly one-third of the twenty-four hours of each working day, and much more than that on Saturdays and Sundays was taken up either with doing very trifling things or in actually doing nothing. He had considerable leisure, but he was wasting it. If the boy who thinks he has little or no leisure time will make a similar experiment, he may have his eyes opened. The undeniable fact is that most of us waste our leisure; we get out of it neither pleasure nor profit.

There are few things which more accurately reveal your character than the use that you make of your leisure time or would make of it if you could follow your own desires. If for the next twenty-four hours you could do as you please, go where you want to, and be asked no ques-


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 tions, what would you do? Some boys would go fishing, some would read a book or build something. I know boys who would stay in bed sleeping most of the time and others who would not go to bed at all; some would play a game or take a trip, and some would do things about which they would not care to speak. It might be very interesting for every boy to think the question out for himself and to answer it.

Many people, boys and men, are quite at a loss to know what to do with leisure time and quite upset if unexpectedly they are confronted with an hour or two of leisure and are separated from their ordinary entertainment. Many are like the old citizen in an isolated New England village, who being asked what he did in the winter when the summer tourists with whom he employed his time had gone, replied.

"Wal, mostly I set and think; and sometimes I jest set."

Those who have not trained themselves to think, who have no resourcefulness when left to their own devices, are sometimes forced merely to "set," and to find little pleasure in leisure time and no incentive to thought.

Coming into Atlanta one Sunday morning not long ago, I had as a seatmate an intelligent looking man of middle age who was bemoaning the fact that he was to have an unoccupied day in a city with which he was not familiar. Only two possible solutions of the problem as how best to spend a tiresome day suggested themselves to him—the Sunday newspaper and sleep. Church, music, books, the


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 woods, a quiet walk—none of these made any appeal to him. He only yawned, bored at the mere thought that here was a whole day at his disposal and positively nothing to do. It was really sad to realize that here was a man whose life was more than half gone and who, when left to himself, was helpless to enjoy it. Some time I intend to write an article on how to spend one's time enjoyably in railroad stations.

One of the most unhappy men I know has an attractive home, a comfortable income, and much leisure. He is not harassed by hard toil or the fear of poverty; but he does not know how to spend his leisure. He has not cultivated any special friendships with people, or interest in them, he does not find enjoyment in reading, he takes no pleasure in the beautiful birds, and flowers, and trees with which he is surrounded. He plays no games, finds no comfort in exercise, and is at his wits end when he has read the Breeders' Gazette and the village newspaper. Like the New England farmer the most that he does is just to "set." A boy should cultivate as many interests as possible, should find a hundred interesting and profitable ways to employ his leisure time. In doing so he will be happier and wiser now, and more useful and happy later in life.

A boy's greatest danger and his greatest temptation comes not while he is at work, not while he is busy with something that keeps his brain and his hands employed but when he is free to do as he pleases, when his time is


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 his own and when he does not know quite what to do with it, when he is out from under any direction but his own personal desires. It is only another illustration of Satan finding work for idle hands to do. Practically every bad habit that a boy develops, every moral misstep that he makes, may be traced to the misuse of leisure time. Any boy who has learned to smoke or to swear or to drink or to gamble or to be dishonest or to associate with vulgar or lewd women will admit, if he will recall his first offense, that in nine cases out of ten, he slipped at some vacation time, or at some time when he was free from the regular obligations of his daily work and with other fellows was left to his own devices. It is a story generally of "nothing to do" and "out for a time."

That was Tom Brown's experience as told in the story with which every high school boy is familiar. He was saved, fortunately, from the great temptation, but it was more through good luck than good management. If Arthur Donnithorne had had more to do, if his leisure time had been spent in something besides idleness and the pursuit of selfish pleasure, the tragedy of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede might very easily have been averted.

There is a good reason for this condition of affairs. A boy relaxes at vacation time, he lets down, he is somewhat off his guard, and he therefore is more open to suggestion. It is at week ends, and Christmas time, and summer vacations, it is on the night when he is allowed to stay out after his regular bed time that the temptation comes. He wants


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 to be a "good fellow," he can not bear to be thought a quitter; when something a little daring or risque is proposed, he often lacks the courage to stand out against it, and the inevitable happens. Disease and drunkenness and irregularities of all sorts are far more imminent at vacations than at any other time. The most dangerous times are when he is excited by victory or depressed by defeat or when he has so much leisure on his hands that he grows bored with it and must break loose into the irregular in order to relieve his pent-up feelings. I believe in athletics, but it must be confessed that the athletic contest is responsible for a good many boyish derelictions, because the excitement of victory or the despondency of defeat throws the boy out of himself for the time being and makes him an easy victim to the temptations which are always lying in wait.

It is nearly always an unfortunate thing for a boy to have no regular duties or responsibilities aside from his school work. The most unhappy and the most discontented boys I know, the laziest and the most dissipated, are those whose time before and after school is at their own disposal. They are likely to develop habits of extravagance, to become spendthrifts and loafers, and the loafer is generally ready for any sort of proposition that may come up that will give him a new sensation or a novel experience, immoral or otherwise. Even if the boy with unlimited leisure develops the habit of reading, which in itself is a very creditable one, his tendency will be to be-


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 come something of a recluse, to shut himself in, and to grow pale and round shouldered and out of touch with other fellows of his age. Every growing boy is better off for having some regular work to do, something physical, if possible, that will harden his muscles and develop his strength and teach him to assume responsibility. Boys usually have to learn to like work as they learn to like olives, by keeping at it until their taste is developed. I know too many boys who would feel humiliated to be caught washing the car, or mowing the lawn, or taking care of the furnace, but any boy, no matter what the financial standing of his father may be, is made stronger and more manly and more dependable and happier, if he has a steady regular job to take up a part of his leisure time, and to teach him the dignity of labor and the value of money. I have never known anyone, boy or man, who lost caste by working, or who on the other hand was not helped by doing so.

In conjunction with too much leisure or leisure that is largely without occupation, too much spending money is a bad thing for a boy. When a boy has so much money at his disposal that he needs to give little thought to his expenditures, he is likely to grow selfish, to fall into extravagances, if not to drift into worse things. It is an uncomfortable situation for a boy to have too little money or less than the fellows with whom he regularly associates; it is a dangerous one for him to have so much that he can daily gratify his appetites or satisfy his desires for pleas-


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 ure. If he does not learn while he is young to make some sort of sacrifice and to deny himself, he will not find it easy later in life.

Granted that there is danger to the young boy who has a considerable amount of leisure, there is, also, to the one who will use it wisely, a great opportunity. Most men who have come up from poverty and ignorance to positions of financial responsibility and intellectual attainment have done so through the regular and wise utilization of their leisure time. One of the best French scholars I know got all his preliminary knowledge during his leisure hours in the army when he was only a young boy. The biographies of well-known men furnish innumerable illustrations of boys who, with little encouragement and less opportunity, by using their leisure hours wisely made themselves ready for positions which would not otherwise have been open to them.

There are various ways in which the high school boy may utilize his leisure time. He may use it, as too many boys do, in the pursuit of so-called pleasures that are actually injurious to his health and to his character. It is not necessary to specify all of the things which are a real injury to a young fellow; one may be pretty well assured, however, that when the high school boy is out every night of the week until long after he should be in bed, whatever he may be doing, he is not attending Sunday school. When boys are found nightly hanging about street corners or talking to careless silly girls, they are not picking up


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 information that will be of any particular service to them or developing habits that will better fit them for citizenship. Few boys develop vicious or immoral habits with the idea of continuing them. It is the fling of the moment, they say, and they promise themselves and their friends, often, that their derelictions are to be short lived. Experience shows, however, that the high school boy who even for a brief period falls into questionable habits finds it no easy matter to separate himself from them. Experiences of all sorts, at his age, sink deep into his consciousness and are hard to eradicate—psychologists tell us that such impressions are eradicated with far more difficulty than are those which come later in life. Fortunately, the larger percentage of boys are saved from such experiences.

Most of the young boys whom I know do not spend their time viciously but foolishly. They are not during their leisure developing useful knowledge or physical strength, or cultivating habits or tasks that yield them much present gratification or insure future happiness or usefulness, most of their activities being only momentary gratification.

"What did you do yesterday, before and after school?" I asked Frank a few days ago. Frank is aged seventeen and is making a feeble attempt to get through the junior year in high school. His father is a well-to-do citizen who has established himself in his present business by long and consistent hard work. He usually looks


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 after his own furnace and occasionally mows his own lawn. I have even caught him washing his car or putting up the screens to his house. Frank has unlimited leisure and doesn't know a lawn mower from a cream separator. He knows how to drive a car but is ignorant of even the crudest methods of washing it. He is always well dressed and spends money freely. He is, in fact, a very pleasant and a very popular boy. He spends his leisure time as most boys in his class do.

"I slept so late in the morning," was his reply, "that by missing my breakfast I barely had time to get to school for my first recitation. At lunch time Paul and I went down to Harris' and had an egg malted milk. After our last recitation for the day we had another drink and then went to the movies. We fooled round until dinner time and took a ride in the car until bed time. In fact, I guess it was a little after bed time, for as nearly as I remember it was about one a m. when I rolled in."

And this is not unusual; it is his regular program. He seldom if ever studies; he has no interest in athletics; he does not look into a newspaper; he never reads a book. The car and sentimental girls and ice cream parlors and moving picture shows take up practically all of his leisure time which is not given over to lying in bed, or strumming a ukelele. It is a gay and carefree life he lives!

There is little harm, possibly, in racing a motor car about town, but it is, in the long run, an expensive


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 pastime if it is not sometimes a dangerous one. It is the young boy, usually, who exceeds the speed limit. I can see little real profit or permanent good in most of the vaudeville or moving picture shows. The plays which appear regularly on the screen are frequently full of questionable suggestions if they are not actually vulgar, and at best they are unlikely often to aid in the development of either good taste or good morals; and yet there are many young boys in almost every town who would be unhappy and discontented if they did not attend at least one show a day, and I know many who during the summer time go twice a day. There are far better ways of spending leisure time, and ways which will bring more satisfactory returns both to the young boy and to the man that he will later become.

I was visiting not long ago in a part of the United States with whose trees and birds and flowers I had previously not been familiar. These things were to me both curious and interesting, and I asked a good many direct questions about them. Only one of the six or eight boys with whom I was walking about could give me any satisfactory information as to the names of the trees or the birds or the flowers with which I was not familiar though they were all intelligent in general matters, were graduates of good high schools, and had lived in the community all their lives.

Some of them ventured a guess, but in every case, as I remember, they guessed incorrectly. They were


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 which had mitigated the end of my journey with Margaret—a mood of intense perception in which my strained mind settled on every vivid object that came under my eyes and tried to identify myself with its brightness and its lack of human passion. This does not mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation; it means that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at


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 a little annoyed finally at their apparent ignorance, and one of them determined to show me that he was not wholly unfamiliar with the flora of his region. As we were passing through a park, he pointed out a bed of flowers saying, "Well, I know what those flowers are, anyway: they're phlox." He was really mistaken, though I did not have the courage to tell him so, for they were petunias.

Now, a boy who is fifteen years of age and who has spent any considerable time out of doors ought to have had interest and curiosity enough to learn the names of the plants which he has seen growing about him every day, he ought to be as familiar with common trees and shrubs as he is with the people whom he meets daily on the street. If he had such knowledge, it would enliven every quiet walk which he might take, it would give interest to every journey and help to dispel lonesomeness and gloom; for every bird in the hedges, every vine and shrub and flower which he would see from the car window, would seem like meeting an old friend on the streets of a strange city. The reasons why boys find so little pleasure in long walks into the country or in quiet strolls in the woods when there is no girl along, is because they meet little or nothing that is interesting or familiar; they lack the information and the training necessary to bring them pleasure, though it is information which might very easily be obtained.

There is no method of occupying one's leisure time


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 that will bring more present and permanent pleasure to a boy than reading. Few boys read the newspapers "and those who do generally confine themselves to the cartoons and the sporting page. I shall have more in in detail to say about this subject in another article, so that I shall simply content myself with saying here, that part, at least, of a boy's leisure every day should be devoted to general reading that will stimulate his imagination, keep him informed on what is going on in the world today and what was going on centuries ago.

The boy or the man who reads is always safer and happier and has a great advantage over his companion who does not do so. He has a possibility of general intelligence not open to other boys.

Men who have not learned to take regular exercise while they are boys are little likely to do so later in life, and the adult man who engages in no regular exercise or who does not play with some sort of skill an athletic out-of-door game will grow old and ineffective earlier in life than would otherwise be the case, will grow wide of girth or slow on his feet even if he does not actually break down. There is nothing like exercise for keeping one young and active. The youngest old man that I know, in some ways a boy still at eighty, has played every day for many years, and is still playing, a vigorous athletic game.

Few people will keep up an interest in any athletic game in which they do not show some skill. Everybody


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 who is normal likes to beat rather than to be beaten, and skill in almost any game which requires physical alertness, unless it be golf, is seldom developed unless one begins in youth. Further than this, if one waits until he is out of high school or college before he takes up any athletic recreation he is likely to argue and to prove the point to himself, that he has not time for such foolishness; his business is too exacting, his responsibilities are too great, things generally would go to the bow-wows if he took the time to learn what his better judgment tells him would be the best thing in the world for him. The high school boy has no such excuse. He has plenty of time, he would be immeasurably benefited by such exercise both now and later in life, and the development of skill is for him so much more possible than for an older man. There are few boys, no matter how thin or fat, heavy or light, tall or short, who could not by persistence develop skill beyond the commonplace in some sort of healthy athletic activity, and who would not from such development derive the greatest pleasure and profit from the mere joy of contest; from physical strength developed, from friendships formed, from self-reliance gained through the defeat of some opponent. Leisure time spent in the development of a strong healthy body will pay as high an interest on the time invested as anything which a high school boy can engage in. It will develop in him moral stamina and control; it will often bring him the respect and the admiration of his fel-


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 lows and a physical reserve which will be to him a godsend when he needs to call upon it in the emergencies which come sooner or later to all men.

I have a neighbor, a man of education and of ordinary intelligence, who is constantly in mechanical difficulties. If a faucet leaks, he is quite at sea as to what ought to be done to adjust it; if his car gets out of order, he is as much at a loss to know how to fix it as is his ten-year-old son—more at a loss, perhaps, for the boy is learning to use his hands; he can not drive a nail or stoke a furnace, or make anything run that is out of order. If anything mechanical gets out of fix, he stands around as helpless as an infant. He did not when a boy learn to use his hands or to cultivate any mechanical skill.

Every boy of high school age should learn to make things and should develop curiosity enough to want to know how mechanical things are put together and how they run. Tools should not have an awkward feeling in his hands; he should be able to bore a straight hole, to put in a screw correctly, to saw a board evenly, and so to adjust a lawn mower that it will give the lawn a smooth, even hair cut. If he has access to a motor car he ought to figure out its mechanism intelligently enough to understand how to keep it in order and what to do for it when it refuses to work properly. I know boys who have had cars for years who are as confused and helpless when they look under the hood as they would be if they were asked to translate a language with


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 Just then the children saw the gardener of this wonderful land of toys. He was the merriest old man, dressed all in red, and his coat and hat were trimmed with ermine. His hair and beard were as white as the snow and his cheeks were like red, rosy apples, while his eyes twinkled like stars. The children knew who this gardener was at once, you may be sure. Why, it was Santa Claus, of course! He was cutting down a crop of whistles with his sickle. He had a large, red sack at his side and smaller bags nearby, and he was so happy that he sang as he worked:


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 which they were unfamiliar; they have not used their leisure time to advantage; and yet these are the things which any intelligent boy could learn, and the knowledge of which would be a great asset to him both in pleasure and in usefulness.

There is the opportunity, also, which every boy has during his leisure time for the cultivation of friendships, for the understanding of other boys, for the development of relationships which will continue throughout his whole life. I do not undervalue the good effects which come from a boy's association with girls; in another place I shall speak of these somewhat more at length. I believe, however, that the value of a boy's healthy association with other boys is much greater to him during his high school days than any other association he may have. Time spent in acquiring friends and in learning to know and to understand them is usually well spent. As I go back now over a period of forty years I find no greater satisfaction than in the recollection that I came to know a few boys well, that our friendships deepened as time went on, and if I could choose today whom of all of my friends from whom I am now separated by time and distance I should most like to see, and with whom I should soonest drop into the old time relationship, it would be a boy whom I knew first in district school, with whom I later prepared for college, and who was for two years in college my closest friend. I see him now only at rare intervals, for we are separated by a thousand miles or more, but I am sure that


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 the leisure time in childhood and youth and early manhood I spent with him was well spent and brought me happiness then and leaves me a pleasant memory today. The experience I had so long ago, any other boy can have if he gives himself to it.

For most of us, boys or men, there are set tasks which occupy definite portions of time. During these periods we are largely the creatures of routine; lessons or routine duties, or business of one sort or another come to us regularly throughout the day, and we have little or no choice but to do them and to ask no questions. We may each of us exercise a certain amount of discretion or individuality in the doing of this work, but in the main it is put before us without our asking, and it is done today in much the same way as it was yesterday. It is only when it comes to our leisure time that the choice of how it may be employed is ours. We are never so much our real selves as during our leisure hours. Eliminating the leisure time which falls to every high school boy during the five working days of the week, there is always Saturday and Sunday in which he is pretty free to follow his own tactics. He can spend his time in things that are trifling or useless or even harmful. He can sleep, or, what is equally bad if not worse, he can sit around doing absolutely nothing but chatter and gossip and loaf. But life is too short even to waste it in youth; there are too many pleasant and profitable things to do, and it is some of these that in these paragraphs I have attempted to suggest. Every boy must


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 have pleasure, but it should be healthful and stimulating; it should send him back to the regular work which is his to do, stronger, healthier, cleaner, with greater energy and greater ambition. If from your leisure hours you come to your regular work listless and yawning and without ambition or pleasure at the thought of work, if your pleasure has left you tired and irritable, if your recreation, however you spend it, has not in some way made you a better boy and better prepared you for your work, then it has not been spent as it should have been. You should work it out some other way.


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 He was just ready to make up another verse when he spied the two children. “Oh, ho, ho, ho!” he laughed merrily, “how did you two children come here?”

“Please, Mr. Santa Claus,” said ^Willie shyly, “we were waiting for you to visit us and the next thing we knew we were in this garden. We don’t know how we came here, but, now that we are here, may we not help you to pick some toys?”

“Indeed, you may,” said Santa Claus. “I need two such helpers. I was just wondering how I could gather all these toys in time for to-morrow. Willie, will you please go over to the garden-bed in the corner and pull up some tops?”

“Pull up some tops!” echoed Willie in amazement. But he took a red sack and went to the garden and began to pull up


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Printing, which is not such an ancient art after all, helped very much to make books more plentiful. Before printing was invented the man outside of the Church who owned a book or who could get at one easily was almost as rare as the man who kept a pet elephant. There were not many books, and those there were, were hard to get at and had few readers. The ability to read was not so common as today, for schools were not run at public expense, and education was not general and was not compulsory. Books were laboriously lettered by hand and bound with great care. It took a long time to make a book. Sometimes they were chained to the table upon which they lay, so that people might have an opportunity to read them and yet not be able to carry them away. The reading habit was, therefore, not a common one.

Even after printing was introduced, books did not at once become plentiful. For generations, the daily newspaper was almost unthought of. When it was established, it had little circulation excepting in cities, and neither newspapers nor books were generally to be found in the houses of the common people. They could not afford them, and they did not realize either the pleasure or the benefits of reading.

Respect for books, even within the experience of our


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 grandparents, was much greater than it now is. It was a signal honor to be given a book. When as a boy of ten Jim Justice, our neighbor boy, won a copy of Robinson Crusoe as a prize for regular attendance at school, he was looked upon almost with as much respect as today is accorded the returning soldier who has won the Distinguished Service Medal. It is not so in these times. Books are too common; they are too easily obtained and too generally at our disposal.

I ran across grandmother's geography this morning, The Village Elementary Geography, standing primly beside Bob's First Year Latin Lessons, on our bookshelves. Bob is my nephew who is in high school. Grandmother's book is yellowed with age, but, save for a few thumb prints, the pages are clean and without dog ears. It is still covered with the bright calico which her grandmother sewed on for her to keep the book from being soiled or injured when the little girl carried it to school. Grandmother's name and the date is on the flyleaf written in a cramped childish hand, for grandmother was only eight when she got the book, and the date is near the beginning of the last century. She always handled the book with the greatest care, for they had respect for books in those days.

Robert's book presents a somewhat different appearance. It was bought only a few months ago, but the cover is torn and battered and hangs by a thread. Inside, the pages are mutilated or missing, and pen sketches


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 and hieroglyphics are scrawled across the text making it almost unreadable. As I turn through, I find the dignified Cicero wearing a sombrero and smoking a pipe, and Cæsar with a beard done in India ink. The book has suffered every insult and indignity possible to be thought of by a boy of fourteen. Robert knows more than grandmother did at his age, but neither he nor the children with whom he associates have the love and respect for books that grandmother had as a girl.

As for me I should as soon see a dear friend abused as a book I have worked with and come to know and to understand. I do not mind the ordinary wear of use and age any more than I am annoyed by wrinkles in the faces of my friends who are growing old, but intentional indignities hurt me.

Is it because books are so plentiful or so cheap that we care so little about them? Is it because they cost us now no sacrifice, no struggle, no tender thought or anxious anticipation that we think of them so lightly and toss them about so carelessly? I have heard grandmother tell of how happy she was and how proud when her father first put the little geography into her hands. Neither high school nor college students often feel so today.

The story of Lincoln, unable to find a half dozen books in the community in which he lived and willing to work days in order that he might become the owner of a worn and rain-soaked volume of biography seems almost


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 unbelievable to the young boy of today who spends his money freely on moving picture shows and ice cream sodas, but who would seldom go far or suffer much to get a book, and who, in fact, is often bored if he is called upon to read one.

Books were never so readily within the reach of all as today; newspapers were never before so abundant and so full of varied information as at the present time; a bulky and profusely illustrated magazine that will keep one reading for many hours, may be bought for a dime. There is no one so poor that he can not buy reading matter, or there are not many who are not now within reasonable distance of libraries with free access to the most varied assortment of books and newspapers. Few people, in this country at least, can assert truthfully that there is nothing for them to read. No doubt the very abundance of books, the ease with which we get at them, causes us to value them less than we otherwise should and to respect them less. That which is most difficult is obtain is most valued. Tom Sawyer recognized this fact when he had the garden fence whitewashed by his eager pals. If we had fewer books we should think more highly of books and respect them more. We see them scattered about us so abundantly that we take them like automobiles and aëroplanes as a matter of course.

If a high school boy does not have the reading habit it is certainly not from lack of opportunity to acquire it. In


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 their spiritual relationships. If he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped; if he had expanded his meaning and said, "You are nothing to me; my heart is separate from your hearts," we would have wept at an unkindness he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty not at all save as a stranger who had somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the orderer of his meals he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the unessential and the irritating. I was


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 the elementary school and high school curriculum more time is given to English, including reading, grammar, literature, and composition, than to any other two or three subjects in the school course combined. Perhaps the reason why young people read so badly when called upon orally to interpret a page, and care so little for reading, is that they have so much of it. We can all become sated with the most delightful things; I have known boys who ate so much cake and ice cream that they never wanted any again.

Another reason, perhaps, why high school and college students (for the difficulty is not confined to the high school) read so badly and take so little pleasure in reading is because all through their school life their taste is forced, they are made to read what is far beyond their ability to understand and to enjoy, and they are taught to cultivate critical judgment rather than appreciation. They analyze what they read when they should be allowed to give themselves over to the pleasure of reading. They attempt to be critics rather than lovers of books. They are told what is good and what effect it should have upon their minds and their emotions, and they play the hypocrite often by pretending to feel what they are told they should feel.

"What do you think," I asked my fourteen-year-old boys in Sunday School a few years ago, "is the best book in the world? What is the best book you ever read?"

"The Bible," one boy piously answered.


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 "Shakspere's Macbeth," another literary hypocrite shouted waving his hand in the air. Not one of the boys told the truth; they were afraid to do so. Down in their hearts they were really enshrining Huckleberry Finn or one of the heroes of Nick Carter's exciting tales. They were saying what they thought they ought to say. They were following the example which many of us who are older set for them in our spoken estimate of the fine arts, especially of music and painting. It takes training and experience and education to enjoy the best things in these arts, and many of us have not brought ourselves to the point of really enjoying what is best. We yawn or sleep through a concert, or we stand bored before a great painting praising the artistic product with our lips but getting little enjoyment out of it in our souls, because we do not yet know enough to enjoy it. And that is the way many boys feel about the literature they are forced to read and to criticise in the high school.

There is little doubt in my mind that Mr. William Shakspere was a great writer of English poetry and of the English drama; he was, perhaps, the greatest writer that we have ever known, but he is not the most easily understood, nor is he ever likely to give the greatest enjoyment to young and immature minds. Even in college it is not common to find a young fellow of eighteen or twenty who picks up a volume of Shakspere to read for pleasure to fill in an hour of leisure. I confess I was not a little startled a few months ago when an eighteen-year-old


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 convalescent in our hospital asked me to bring him a book to read while he was getting well.

"What would you like?" I asked, expecting of course that he would say Harold Bell Wright or O. Henry, or suggest a stray copy of the Cosmopolitan or the Red Book.

"I think I should like to read Henry V," was his reply. The only explanation is that he must have had a rare mind or an unusually inspiring teacher.

I do not wish to suggest to high school boys that they are justified in spending their time on trashy reading. The better things they read and understand and enjoy, the better for them. I am convinced that they are asked to read many books good in themselves, but far beyond their understanding and their appreciation. It is the reading habit which they should cultivate, and no one is likely to get that habit unless reading is a pleasure for him, unless books tempt him when he sees them lying about, and lure him away from his work or from other appealing pleasures. I know few boys who would decline an invitation to a moving picture show in order to finish an interesting book.

There is a good deal said against the reading of trashy books by boys, and I think much that has been said is not without a foundation of truth; the practice is too general. I think I read up to the age of fifteen as much trashy stuff as any normal boy of my age. I read Mary J. Holmes and E. P. Roe and all their clan, from Edna Rivers to Barriers Burned Away. I went through the goodie-goodie


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 volumes in our Sunday school library at the rate of two or three a week. I waited with the utmost impatience for the weekly copy of the Saturday Night contributed to the family stock of reading matter by our hired man, and containing the most exciting tales of murder, mystery and adventure. I remember still the lurid title of one of these tales—Bentley Burroughs, or The Skeleton Hand.

I had something on hand to read all the time, and, fortunately I developed the habit of reading. In the course of events the stock of sensational and sentimental and adventurous stuff gave out, but my appetite still had to be satisfied. I went quite naturally to Dumas and Scott and Cooper and Bulwer-Lytton; to Dickens and Eliot and Thackeray. I even read some poetry at my father's suggestion, and I got a good deal of insight into historical works. Before I was grown, I had read pretty widely, far more widely, in fact, than I should ever under any other circumstances have had the time to do. I am thankful every day that thus early in my life I became acquainted with so wide a range of literature, even if some of the books I read are not now contained in the admirable list suggested by President Eliot. I can not now see how I was hurt in any way. I got enough, after a while, of the poorer stuff and ultimately developed an appetite for something solider and better.

I do not believe that my experience is unique. I have asked my friends, many of them, whose reputation for clear thinking and balanced judgment in literary matters


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 toy tops. There were large tops growing like turnips and little tops growing like beets and radishes. There were all kinds of tops; some would humm-humm-humm-m-m and make music while Willie pulled them up. Next, Willie climbed a tree and began to pick red marbles growing just like cherries; and he found purple and blue marbles growing on a trellis, just like grapes—so he filled many small bags with marbles. He also climbed other trees where he thought he saw apples and oranges growing, but, when he came near them, he found different-colored balls—so he picked a bag of balls for Santa.

‘Oh, Santa, may I help too?” asked Annie.

“Indeed you may, my child,” he answered. “How should you like to pick dollies?” So all this time Annie was busy getting him dollies, and she was very happy.


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 is better than my own, and not one of them has any serious regrets concerning his early reading, which was in many cases quite as light as mine. The reading of the poorer forms of literature often makes the good better in contrast. The main thing is that one should get the habit of reading. If that is developed early, the problem of cultivating a liking for what is good and of eventually developing a real interest in what is best, is not so difficult.

The high school boy is at the age when adventure and mystery are most appealing to him. He will learn to read this sort of literature most readily. He might as well be fed on Dumas and Jules Verne and Conan Doyle and Stevenson as upon Nick Carter; he might as well have good English and stimulating healthy adventure as the opposite.

The reading habit is cultivated like any other habit, and the taste for books developed like any other taste, by practice, and persistence. We can learn anything if we want to do so and if we keep at it. The reading habit is a good one because it furnishes us a ready method of getting information, of learning about what has been done and what is doing in the world. We would stagnate if we did not read; we could make little progress in any sort of work without reading. The business or professional man who does not read soon gets to be a back number in his work.

There is nothing that can give one more pleasure than the habit of reading. If one has learned to read and


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 to enjoy books he need never have a dull or a lonesome moment. No matter where he may be, if he has an interesting book at hand, he can soon in imagination surround himself with interesting scenes and pleasing friends, and his cares and his boredom will vanish. If a boy likes to read, an evening at home alone, a long wait in an otherwise dull railway station, lack of companionship for a time, isolation of any sort, will not only have no horrors for him, but may even be for a time a source of actual enjoyment. I always like a rainy day or a stormy night in winter, or a quiet undisturbed Sunday afternoon, because it furnishes a chance to stay in-doors and to cultivate the companionship of an entertaining book.

When I hear boys, or men, complaining of the fact that Sunday is such a long, dull day, that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do, when I see them yawning with the weariness of leisure and strolling aimlessly down the street tired of existence, I know for one thing that they find little comfort in religion, and for another, that they have not cultivated the reading habit, and so find little pleasure in books. I am always sorry to think what pleasure they have missed, and I wish that I might lead them into the friendships and the companionships which are so easily formed through reading. Think what it must mean not to have known and enjoyed Wilkins Micawber, and King Lear, and Tom Tulliver, and D'Artagnan and Sidney Carton and Colonel Newcome


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 and Tom Jones, and Becky Sharpe, and all the myriad of interesting characters with which literature is filled. Life must be pretty dull to those whose acquaintance is limited to real people only.

One of the most placid and contented persons I have ever known was an old lady who was totally blind and who was forced for several years to lie in bed a good deal of the time alone. I used to drop in upon her frequently and usually quite unexpectedly. The great surprise to me was that I never found her depressed or with time hanging heavy on her hands. She was uniformally cheerful and happy and with a mind that seemed constantly occupied with something that was interesting and pleasing.

"What do you doto occupy your time and your thoughts when you are so much alone," I asked her once, "especially when you can not see?"

"I visit with my old friends," she said.

Then she went on to tell me that all through early and middle life, although she had had little opportunity for education in the schools, she had been a constant reader. I was amazed to discover how much she had read and how well she remembered it. Now that she was old and blind she went over all these literary experiences in her mind daily, and she got from the recollection infinite pleasure and recreation. Just the day I had been talking to her, she told me, she had been recalling the incidents in Scott's Heart of Midlothian


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 “You dear, dear dollies!” Annie said, as she hugged each one in turn. “How happy all the little girls will be when they find these dollies Christmas morning! ” There were large dolls with the cutest bonnets on their heads, growing just like roses, and other dollies with the dearest pointed hats, growing up like tall holly-hocks. And then there were tiny dollies like pansies turning their pretty little faces up toward Annie.

Presently Santa Claus began to water the grass and suddenly every blade of grass was a tiny tin soldier with his musket erectly held, while soldiers’ tents, like mushrooms, sprang up all around. War-ships, sailboats, steam-boats, motor-boats, row-boats and canoes were all out on a lake nearby, but they could never sink, for the lake was a large looking-glass, and fishes, ducks and


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 the scenes of which were made more vivid to her from the fact that she had been born in northern England, had visited Edinburgh as a girl, and knew very well, because her own youthful feet had trodden it, the road which Jeanie Deans had taken from Edinburgh to London when she went to plead for her sister's life. Her early reading was the source of hourly pleasure to her, and made quite bearable an existence which might otherwise have been wretched even to contemplate.

No one has so much time at his disposal to learn to read as the young person before he enters high school and during his high school course. More than this, youth is the habit-forming time, as I have said, more than once. If one does not learn the habit of reading then, he is not likely ever to acquire it. It would seem easy to prove that with all the opportunities furnished the boy for reading while he is in the elementary school, and after he enters high school, with the great variety of reading he is required to do, and with the wide range of books from which he may choose, he would learn to like something, he would cultivate his interest, and would continue his acquaintance with books during vacation and after he had graduated from high school. The number of boys, however, who regularly and of their own choice read books while they are in the high school and after they get out is small, and the class of books in which they find interest is often very poor. The training in English in our schools does not develop the


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 reading habit generally nor does it awaken generally an interest in good not to say the best, literature. I have suggested previously that I believe the explanation of this condition arises from the fact that we force the taste of young people and feed them at first on things they can not assimilate. We give them literary indigestion, and they revolt from reading.

There is scarcely a day of his life until he finishes high school that a boy might not devote at least a short time to reading from which he could derive both pleasure and profit. If you want to learn to read, select first the things that are most interesting to you—history, science, poetry, fiction, the news of the day, or whatever it may be. Read the best things that you can understand and enjoy. You will find that scientific facts as presented by Darwin and Huxley and John Burroughs are not only quite as dependable as those which commonplace writers give you, but they are so simply and so interestingly presented that they read like a story book; they will develop your scientific interest far more quickly than if you give your time to some other author who knows less and writes worse. If you enjoy history, then read Macaulay or John Fiske, or Motley or any one of a dozen men who will give you all the facts that a less brilliant author might present, and who will do it in a style that is at once delightful and inspiring. If you are drawn to the fiction of heroism and adventure you will not know what delight there is in romance at its best until you have tasted


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 subsistence, ended in a feeling of jealousy us ugly and unmental as sickness. This was the saddest spring.

Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our rejection. You may think we were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely the delusion of a madman. But every minute of the day, particularly at those trying times when he strolled about the house and grounds with the doctors, smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive commercial traveler in a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that if madness means a liability to wild error about the world Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about


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 the incomparable Dumas who will lead you through one volume and another with a fascination that is impossible to resist. The boy who once gets into the Three Musketeers and who lays it down before it is finished, has a self-control which is beyond my understanding.

If you find it not easy to cultivate the reading habit from lack of interest or for apparent lack of time, you will be tempted to it rather subtly by having a book near by, so that when you drop into an easy chair, or stretch yourself on a couch, for a little rest or to wait until dinner is ready, it will catch your eye or fall easily into your hand. If the book is your own, and especially if you have been led through curiosity or passing fancy to pay for it with your own money, the temptation will be all the stronger for you to see what is in it; and, if you have any persistence, having once begun it, you will be sure to stay with it until you have finished it. The reading of one book almost invariably leads to the reading of another, and so gradually the habit fastens itself upon you.

The difficulty which most men have in college or later in life in accomplishing as much reading as is set for them to do, is due to their not having cultivated the habit of reading rapidly. The ability to read rapidly comes from experience; if you have read little you are quite likely to read slowly. Reading is very largely a mechanical process acquired through daily practice like playing the piano or operating a typewriter. If


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 it takes you all the evening to get through a few pages, it is quite certain that you have not cultivated very fully the reading habit. Here, again, the value of beginning while young and while you have leisure to cultivate the habit of reading rapidly and reading widely is apparent.

The wider the range of your reading, the more enjoyment you will get out of it, and the greater will be the development of your knowledge, your sympathies, and your imagination. Everyone should read the daily newspapers in order that he may have an intelligent knowledge of the world and its progress at home and abroad. No intelligent boy can now afford to be ignorant of the progress of events in all lands. The world is, after all, a pretty small place, and it is not very hard, if one tries, to know something about a good deal of it. If you read the newspaper as you should, you will read it pretty thoroughly from the feature news on the first page through the editorials to the market reports on the last page. The cartoons, the jokes, and the sporting page will, of course, interest you most, but you can easily cultivate an interest in other things.

You should keep up with the literature of the profession or business in which you are engaged or in which you expect to engage. It is not enough, however, if you are interested in farming to be satisfied with reading an agricultural journal and the local weekly paper. I know a good many farmers who get no further in their reading


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 swans were swimming on looking-glass streams. The children rushed from one garden to another and saw so many things to pick that they were kept very busy helping Santa Claus.

“Oh, see those pumpkins and squashes over there on those vines!” exclaimed Willie, but when he went to pick them he found drums, large and small, and foot-balls and basket-balls lying on the ground, like melons and pumpkins turned brown.

“Whee-ee-ee-ee! Isn’t this jolly! See those funny brown leaves blowing in the wind,” called Annie. “They are all sizes and shapes.” When the children came near to pick them, they found no leaves at all, but brown Teddybears with their arms and feet out-stretched. The children hugged them in their arms and the Teddy-bears gave little squeaks of glee,


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 than the perusal once a week of a stock journal. These are not very progressive men, however. The newspapers and the technical journals are for information largely. You should read something regularly for inspiration, for kindling your imagination, and for developing your ideals. Read poetry. The better magazines are full of pleasant and inspiring verse, and there is always, to fall back upon, the good old standbys which you have studied and are studying in high school. You will never be sorry if you form the habit early of committing to memory such lines or stanzas or whole poems as especially please you. All through your life these lines will come back to you to be a source of pleasure and a stimulation to happy memories. Middle life and old age seem to you now very remote possibilities, but they will be on you, especially if you lead a busy life, almost before you know it. You will always be glad if while your mind is plastic and easily impressed, you let it dwell upon things that are pleasing and beautiful, and if at will you can recall passages from the best things that have been written.

Nearly everyone reads fiction of some sort, of course—adventure, romance, mystery, character study, philosophy—there are many things treated in the modern novel or short story, and every day, almost, there seems to be a new magazine springing up filled with fiction and feature stories and attracting the eye with its bizarre and particolored cover. Most of these are rather trashy,—a good deal of the fiction of today is hardly worth the time


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 it takes to read it. The magazines which our fathers read and which have stood the test for fifty years or more, are still the best, and one of these, at least, you ought to read regularly. A magazine usually announces both the quality and the character of its contents by the refinement and taste of the design on its cover. The quiet ones are the most conservative and the most worth while.

You will have to read some books of the present day; you would be thought ignorant and behind the times otherwise. People will continue to talk about last month's "best sellers," and though very often there is little reason why these books should sell so well, you will miss something if you are unacquainted with them. Your greatest pleasure in reading, however, will be in the books that have stood the test of time—in Scott, and Cooper and Dickens, and Eliot and Thackeray and Hawthorne and Stevenson, of whose infinite variety you can not tire. If you have not already made their acquaintance, you should begin at once. If you have not before this read the most that they have written, you have to look forward to one of the great pleasures of your life.

Since I began the writing of this paper I have been reading aloud Dickens' David Copperfield. I read it first when I was ten with the greatest pleasure and interest; I have read it since a half dozen times, I have no doubt, and yet I think the fact of any former readings adds rather than detracts from the pleasure which I get from it today. As long as I live it will give me joy to go through its chapters.


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 Sometimes I hear boys say "I don't like Stevenson," or "I don't like Dickens." In such cases, however, I usually find that they have read very little of these authors—one book perhaps—and have based their judgment upon that one volume. Don't be discouraged if you are not pleased the first time you dip into an author; try something else. No two books are more unlike than The Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations and any one who has read only Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might not suspect that Stevenson wrote a book like Treasure Island or The Wrong Box. An author, like any other normal human being, has different interests and different moods, and we can not honestly judge him until we have seen him under different conditions.

If from your high school course you get nothing else than the ability to read intelligently, an appreciation of books, and a liking for their companionship, the years in school will not have been spent in vain. If you come away from your high school training with a dislike for study, and with little or no interest in books, and no joy in the anticipation of reading you have missed much of what you should have gained.


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 for they were so glad to be gathered in with this harvest of toys.

Suddenly, overhead, the children heard a whirr-whirr-whirring noise, and when they looked up it seemed as if great swarms of dragon-flies and butterflies were hovering over them. “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Santa Claus, as he watched the surprised children. “Those are new toys; they only lately have come to my land—but, here, take these butterfly nets and try to catch a few of them.” And when Annie and Willie brought these toys down a little nearer, they saw that they were not dragonflies or butterflies, but toy air-ships.

Tiny, toy trains went gliding over steel rails, across switches, under tunnels, over bridges, and stopped at stations, quite like really, truly trains.


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The social activities of the young almost always seem excessive to the middle-aged. There are few things we forget so easily as the escapades of youth. A middle-aged father was advising his young son against the evils of dancing.

"But you danced, father, when you were a boy," the son protested.

"True," the father replied, "but I have seen the folly of it."

"Well," the boy replied, "I want to see the folly of it, too."

It is a very normal desire for a young boy to want to have regular and pleasant association with other young people both girls and boys, and in what I say in this paper I do not overlook this fact. It is a desire the gratification of which may very easily be carried to excess; it is a desire which parents, especially fathers, are wont to forget that they ever themselves felt. I have never had a son, I am sorry to say, to whom I could tell how hard I worked when a boy, how little money I spent, how seldom I stayed out at night or went to social parties, but I have listened to other fathers discoursing thus virtuously to their sons, so I know that they had forgotten their youth as I might have done had I but had a chance. Social customs change.


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 We should not expect our children to enjoy themselves quite as we did at their age. The pleasures in which I indulged as a boy are very different from those in which my young nephews take delight, though I can not see that mine were either saner or more restrained than theirs, and I try to remember this fact when I am tempted to criticise the social life of the young people of today. I should hardly be excusable, however, if I did not try to give them the benefit of my experience.

Men, young and old, are social animals. All of us like to join things. It is as difficult for me to refuse an invitation to become a member of a club or a fraternity or an organization as it is to resist the seductive talk of a book agent when he spreads his attractive wares before my eyes. I feel like a hero if I can summon the courage to turn him down. We joined church or the Democratic party, I have no doubt, not so much from any strong religious or political convictions as from the fact that we were asked; we found it difficult to resist a chance to join, and we yielded. I am not arguing, however, that there is always profit in joining. Boys feel very much about joining things as men do. When they go into a high school fraternity, they are but imitating their fathers or their older brothers in college each of whom, no doubt, has his club or his fraternity. Yet, on the whole, I am convinced that membership in a high school fraternity is not a good thing.

Such an organization might be beneficial if it were based upon more strictly democratic principles than it often is.


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 Boys are chosen usually for membership not so much because of similarity of tastes and similarity of character as from similarity of their fathers' income and social or business position. Even in the country town in which I live, I could without much chance of error pick out the boys' who, when they leave the graded schools, will be asked to join one or another of the high school fraternities existing in the local high school, and I could do it without knowing the boys personally at all, but simply from my—knowledge of their parents and from my acquaintance with their financial rating. A boy in moderate or meager circumstances very seldom gets into such an organization, unless perchance he be an athlete, who is likely to be taken because he is a hero. The poor boy can not afford to belong; the boy without social prestige would queer the others.

The high school fraternity, excepting in private academies and boarding schools, exists not so much to bring boys together and to strengthen the friendly relations existing between them as to develop a rather excessive social life in which girls are also to a large degree involved. In a private or boarding school the conditions of living are different and the necessity for banding together more justifiable. Such boys are away from home, and they miss their customary social life, and whatever helps to make for them some of the associations and comforts of home is good. A boys' fraternity in a private academy, is, in a large degree, like a college fraternity and usu-


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 ally is free from the objectionable features which characterize such an organization in a city high school. It is largely to make boys acquainted with each other, and not so much to bring the members into closer and more frequent association with girls. It makes for healthy friendship.

The high school fraternity is too frequently little more than a dancing club. Its meetings are taken up largely with discussions of the girl friends of the members, in making arrangements for the next dance, or in trying to determine how best to meet the expenses of the last one. If it gave boys definite work to do, if it developed in them qualities of leadership, or helped them the better to assume responsibility while giving them social training, I should not so much object, but as I have seen the members of such an organization after they are out of high school and in college, I can not see that it often does any of these things for them.

My observation of the high school fraternity man after he has entered college is that he is usually a very indifferent student with little scholastic ambition. His ambitions are mainly social. He makes a poor fraternity man in college, beause he has not realized in his high school fraternity any of the fundamental principles of adult fraternity life. Fraternity officers all over the country are agreed upon this point, and have passed a resolution that after 1920 no high school fraternity man will be eligible for membership in a college Greek letter fra-


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 “How should you like to see my farm?” asked Santa Claus. And the next thing Annie and Willie knew they were in a toyland farm-yard. Houses, fences and barns with stalls for horses and cows, and everything as complete as a real farm. Horses rocked to and fro or rolled about on wheels; toy lambs, so wooly and white, said, “Baa-baabaa,” when their heads were turned to one side.

There was also a menagerie of wild animals nearby. Elephants and tigers, lions and monkeys—more animals than you can tell about—were there, and they looked so real that at first Annie felt like running to hide behind Santa Claus. Then Santa Claus led them through toy villages and they really felt like giants when they looked down on all the dolls’ houses and different stores, toy


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Leisure Hour

Collections

 * Leisure Hours (1823), a poetry collection by Richard Whitfield Asworth
 * Leisure Hours (1870), a poetry collection by John A. Lanigan
 * Leisure Hours (1855), a poetry collection by Tacita

Essays

 * "The Leisure Hour" (1920), an essay by Thomas Arkle Clark

Periodicals

 * The Leisure Hour (1852–1905), a British periodical

title: Leisure Hour


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 ternity. The reason for this action is that the high school fraternity man is selfish, undemocratic, hard to control, and unwilling to assume responsibility.

The expense of membership in such an organization, even for people in good circumstances, is not to be overlooked. The high school fraternity member considers himself quite grown up, and is not content in his social activities to be considered other than a man with all the accessories that accompany adult, manly, social life. Taxis and candy and flowers and evening clothes all form a part of his social functions; dinner dances and all night sessions are not unusual. The high school boy attempts to imitate all the social excesses and extravagances of his older friends and acquaintances. Sometimes there are even rumors of drinking and gambling and immorality, exaggerated perhaps, but having, no doubt, some small foundation in fact.

Only last year I called to my office two freshmen in college who were developing a reputation for idleness and intemperance. They came from conservative, religious, and well-to-do families, so that I could scarcely believe the tales concerning them which were floating about the campus of. They admitted, however, that they were drinking, but of this fact their parents had no suspicion, they said.

"When did you begin?" I asked.

"When we were sophomores in high school," was the a reply. "The fellows in our fraternity all thought it was smart to drink."


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 walk or dance to that distant music; her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse finish fastening its frock. Always she extended a hand in an unbuttoned black thread glove and said, "It's another fine day again," or diffidently, as Kitty continued to withhold her presence, "I hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping well." Then, as our hands touched, he was with us, invoked by our common adoration. I felt his rough male texture and saw the clear warmth of his brown and gold coloring; I thought of him with the passion of exile. To Margaret it was a call, and she moved past me to the garden, holding her hands in front of her as though she bore invisible gifts, and pausing on the step of the French window to smile to herself, as if in her heart she turned over the precious thought: "He is here. This garden holds him." My moment, my small sole


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 It is the secrecy of the fraternity no doubt, that encourages such escapades. It is one of the privileges of club life, the boy thinks, to be able unmolested to attempt risque things, and being alone in his deliberations and free from the guiding hand or the warning voice of older men, he slips easily into temptation.

The high school fraternity is in little or no sense a real brotherhood. Its purpose is not to bring boys together for mutual self-help. It seldom inculcates high moral ideals or develops interest in good scholarship even if it does not actually discourage these things. The members are not selected because they show fitness for doing well the work of high school, but rather because they dress well, dance well, are popular with the girls, and are able to spend money freely upon social pleasure. The high school fraternity seldom if ever has for its purpose the improving of general social conditions in the school or the desire to be an aid to the school authorities in the intelligent and satisfactory control of school affairs. On the contrary it often pulls down scholastic standards, it is a hindrance rather than a help in school management, and it contributes to the pleasure of only a very limited and select number of students. Healthy social activity in the high school should be general, democratic, an activity into which every respectable and well-mannered member of the school may enter, and not limited to a few people who are possessed of money.

I have seldom known a high school fraternity which


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 did not stir up trouble. The exclusiveness of it arouses envy in the minds of those who are not invited to join. It develops cliques and factions, and breaks down rather than strengthens high school spirit. It often makes a boy arrogant and something of a cad. For all these reasons I believe the high school fraternity is in a majority of cases not the healthiest and best medium for the social activities of the high school boy. It develops social selfishness, its members are likely to overestimate their own social importance, it encourages extravagance in money matters and a contempt for others who are outside of this social aristocracy. If I had a boy I should be sorry if he became a member of such an organization.

A few evenings ago I attended a dance to which one of these high school fraternity boys had been invited. He came in his own car and brought with him his "steady girl." He was dressed with extreme care in a decidedly extreme style. She was fifteen perhaps, and he a year older. She showed all the toilet artifices, all the shades of coloration, of the beauty parlor. They danced together continuously throughout the evening, they exhibited the most extreme contortions and gyrations of the "shimmy" they omitted the usual courtesy of speaking to the chaperones, and held themselves entirely aloof throughout the evening from contact with their conservative companions. They admitted by their actions that they were the social elect, the aristocracy who could not bring themselves to the vulgar level of the crowd.


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 I should not, perhaps, blame the boy's lack of good manners and good taste upon his fraternity any more than I should hold it responsible for his failure to pass his high school course in English, but the fraternity, when it took him in, knew what he was, that he had neither moral nor intellectual ideals, that he had no conception of good manners, though his father, it is true, is a prominent professional man. It was this last fact that weighed most heavily in the balance when the boy was being considered for membership. My quarrel with the fraternity lies in the fact that having taken him in it has done nothing to improve him, but on the contrary has rather encouraged him in his extreme habits. It is not giving him the sort of social training that a boy should get in high school.

We can never quite get away from the fact in the discussion of a high school boy's social activities that most high schools are coeducational. In considering boys, we can not ignore the fact that girls, too, come in for a large share of consideration. It is a good thing for a young boy to have a healthy conventional association with girls. It helps him morally and socially. I think that a boy can have no stronger moral influence than the companionship of a high-principled, well-balanced girl. The boy, however, who limits his as associations to girls, or especially to one girl, or who gives a considerable part of his leisure time to such an association is weakened by it. He becomes soft and mushy; he moons around


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 sentimentally taking little pleasure, usually, in the vigorous physical sports which go far to make a man. He develops feminine rather than masculine traits. Highly as I regard the benefits which come to a young fellow from his regular relationships with the right sort of girls, I have no hesitancy in saying that the strong, aggressive, manly qualities which we all want to see in a developing boy come from his regular contact and association with those of his own sex. Constant and uninterrupted association with girls induces fastidiousness and overrefinement in a boy. It takes the fight out of him, it tends toward laziness and lassitude. Such a boy drops easily into a rocking chair or a porch swing. He learns usually to play some stringed instrument like the ukelele or the mandolin, and he talks sentimental non sense.

The young boy with the steady girl is the worst of all. Whenever a boy begins to sing with feeling:

his high school work is likely to go glimmering. It is not always helpful to have a half dozen to divide his attention during his leisure hours; it is positively hopeless if he can see only one on the horizon. The high school boy who devotes his social attentions exclusively to one girl gets little social training or experience. He does not learn to adapt himself to different tempera-


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 ments, he is likely to become lax in his manners and to ignore social conventions. He comes to know the girl so well that he often does not take the trouble to be scrupulously polite to her. There is likely to develop a dangerous familiarity which breaks down the respect and the courtesy which every boy ought to show to the girls of his acquaintance and to women generally. "Spooning" is ruinous to a boy, morally and socially.

Such a boy I see every day. He is in reality girl crazy. Every morning he walks down the street to meet her and to carry her books to school. Twice a day they walk back and forth together, each quite oblivious of any presence but the other. They hang on each other. Every evening, if the weather permits, they go strolling until long past the proper hour for children to be in bed. Late at night I often recognize his sentimental whistle as he goes back home after being with her during the evening. He is failing in his studies; he could be expected to do nothing else, for he sees nothing, thinks of nothing, dreams of no one but the girl; and he treats her and speaks of her with a suggestion of ownership that is disgusting. In this relation as in many others, there is safety in numbers, for if there were a half dozen he would waste far less time and energy than in the present instance, and he would learn more that is useful and helpful in social matters.

There is the boy in high school also who goes to the opposite extreme—who "can't see a girl at all."


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 He is speechless when in the presence of the girls, he blushes crimson if one addresses a remark to him, he has no interest in social activities, and no finesse in social conventionalities. When he comes into a room he is all hands and legs; the furniture seems to become animate and to take delight in getting into his way so that he may the more easily stumble over it. It agonizes him to enter a room where there are girls, it is utterly impossible for him unassisted to get out of one. He can never think of anything to say.

Such a boy would be benefited immeasurably if he forced himself a little more into social activities, if he studied to some extent how to carry on a conversation, how to please people, how to come and go without awkwardness and embarrassment. Nothing causes self-consciousness more than a lack of acquaintance with social usage and social forms, and nothing acquaints one with these details more quickly than a little practice and experience. No boy is so awkward or so crude or so shy that he can not learn with a little training to overcome these traits and to enjoy his social relations with other young people. As soon as he overcomes his first embarrassment he will be surprised at his former point of view.

There is a real value to the growing boy in social activities, in learning to meet men as well as women, and older men and women as well as those who are of their own age; boys can learn how, and it should be considered


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 a necessary part of their education that they do so. I was settling down after dinner, not long ago, to a quiet evening of reading before the grate fire when the telephone rang. I answered the call.

"It's Billy Charters," I explained, as I came back with a rather downcast air. "He has just come to town, and he wants to come over and call this evening. It's a trial, I know, but I couldn't in decency say less than that we'd be glad to see him."

We had known Billy's uncle a number of years ago, and had met his mother once on a visit to Boston; there was no mistaking our duty, and we braced up for a dull evening. The prospect seemed all the more dull in view of the memory of Barker's call on the previous Sunday afternoon. Barker is a neighbor's boy who had arrived just after dinner—we have dinner at one on Sundays—and we wore ourselves to a thin edge in an attempt to introduce topics of conversation that would arouse even a remote interest and enthusiasm on his part. He could not be made to talk, so we lapsed into silence and filled up the time by playing band pieces on the victrola. Other callers came and went, but he hung on.

"He was eager to go, but he did not know how. Finally he arose and expressed an intention of bringing his call to a close. Everyone stood—and continued to stand twenty minutes—watching Barker trying to get out. It was only by my moving him gradually toward the front door and all but pushing him into the street that he ultimately got


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Rh no definite ideas about the matter at all. He was in the same comfortable mental state as the worthy countryman who, being asked what he thought of total depravity, promptly replied that if it was in the Bible he was in favor of it.

In dismissing Black I can not forbear to add that even if the moon could rise in the south; even if rising in the south it should continue rising into the dome when it should be setting; even if rising in the south soon after sunset a half-moon, as it would necessarily be, and continuing to rise into the dome when it should be setting, it could dwindle to a crescent, it could not be of a warm color. The crescent moon is as cold in color as a new dime — almost as cold as a quarter-dollar. In a bench-show of astronomers I doubt if Black would have been awarded a blue ribbon.

I have been reading a story by Mr. Edgar Saltus: " A Maid of Athens " — a story which, like a forgotten candle, burns on well enough to the end and then dies in its own grease. But that is not the point; I find this passage:

"Beneath descending night, the sky was gold-barred and green. In the east the moon glittered like a sickle of tin."

I shall have to add Mr. Saltus to my com-


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 away; and yet Barker was having as unpleasant a time as we were. He had had no social experience.

I heard Billy's step on the walk at a quarter of eight, and I laid down my book with a regretful sigh to usher him in. He proved to be a healthy, cheerful fellow of eighteen who settled down in one of our arm-chairs with a comfortable, easy air that relieved the situation at once. He asked for the people whom he had met when he had visited in our town as a child. He brought us cheerful messages from his uncle's family, and he related a few hilarious tales of his experiences in learning to fly. He seemed interested in all that we had to say, and followed up every conversational lead with a few ideas of his own. If the talk ever gave signs of lagging, he was ready with a question or a remark. He was in no sense fresh; he was simply alert and ready to do his share of the social drudgery. He showed that he had made the most of his social experiences. He rose at a quarter past eight.

"I knew it was a shame to disturb you on an evening like this," he said, "when you'd no doubt far rather read than be bored by me, but it will please mother to know that I've called, and you've given me an awfully pleasant half hour. May I come again?" He shook hands, and in a moment we heard his quick footsteps going down the walk.

"What a nice boy Billy Charters is," my wife said to me as we were going up stairs after a pleasant two hours of reading. "I believe we ought to ask him to dinner next Sunday."


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 "That's just what I was thinking," I replied. And yet all the difference between Billy and Barker was that Billy had learned by observation and experience and Barker had not.

Too much of the social energy of the high school boy at the present time, especially in his relations with girls, is expended in dancing. There is scarcely an organization of young fellows, no matter what its primary purpose seems to have been, whether athletic, philanthropic, religious or educational, which does not, when it comes to any expression of social life, think first of giving a dance. It seems, barring the practice of strolling aimlessly about the streets, the only way a boy can conceive of to give a girl a good time. He could play tennis with her, if he only thought so, and, even if her serve is not so good as his, it might improve from practice and under his careful teaching. He could develop her interest and her skill at golf and by so doing contribute to her pleasure and her physical health. He could take her for a walk into the country, he could teach her to row a boat or to drive a car, or perhaps some time she might teach him one of these things. He may object to some of these pastimes on the ground that they are too strenuous and tiring, but I am sure it can easily be shown that to drag oneself over a none too smooth floor for four hours or so, in an atmosphere that is often close and stuffy and full of dust is quite as tiring and much less stimulating than is an equal amount of exercise in the open air. In the open air, moreover, in the


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 theatres, toy post-offices, toy grocery stores, meat markets, and in all these stores were dolls for clerks and dolls for customers.

Then Santa Claus took them far away from the villages, out through the orchard where the sugar-plum trees were growing, and after they had filled many bags with candy he led them out to the Christmastree forest. Here they found Christmas trees growing with gold and silver tinsel and hung with glass balls and chains, while tiny, colored lights were twinkling through the branches. Santa Claus had to gather these trees and pack them with great care.

The next thing the children knew, Santa Claus had taken them right into his home. There they saw a dear old lady with snow-white hair who was sewing on some dolls’ clothes. (She was dressing some of the


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 cultivation of those sports to which I have referred, there is a chance for far more friendliness and far less familiarity than in dancing. There is, too, the opportunity for the development of courtesy and thoughtfulness, for the cultivation of little polite attentions which are good for a boy to know and to practice.

Before he gets through the high school a boy should have learned a good many things about conventional social customs, and should have gained a certain respect for them. In themselves these customs may mean very little, but observance of them marks us as experienced and thoughtful, and failure to observe them generally indicates that we are crude and careless. It is a little thing to call after one has been invited to dinner, to rise when a lady comes into the room, to speak to the hostess or the chaperones at a party, to take your hat off when you talk to a woman on the street, or to eliminate "say" and "listen" when beginning a conversation, but these are the little things which prove either that one has kept his eyes open and has seen how really careful, experienced people act, or that one has gone about with those whose social activities have been pretty limited.

If there were no other reason for a boy's not confining his attentions to but one girl the reason I have suggested above would be sufficient. Social activities are for training as well as for pleasure. Through his associations with other young people a boy comes to know how to adapt himself to varying conditions and varying temperaments.


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 He learns how easily to meet different sorts of people and ultimately to enjoy different sorts. The man who travels from one state to another or from one county to another comes in time to have a broader view of things. He gains in experience at each new stopping place, he finds new pleasures and new interests wherever he goes, and more than this he develops new powers of enjoyment. The man who knows but one city or who has lived in a country town all his life does not know what his powers of enjoyment are until he has given himself a chance to see what other places there are to give him pleasure. So every young boy in the developing of friendly relationships between his boy and girl associates should give himself as diversified an acquaintance as possible. The more people he knows the better; the more girls he knows the safer for him. It is only through experience and the testing of ourselves that we really come to know the sort of people the association with whom will give us most help and most happiness.

I have seen a good many young fellows who in high school settled their girl friendships for life. It is usually a mistake. Boys are too inexperienced and too immature at that age to determine what will satisfy them later in life. High school friendships are healthy and stimulating; high school engagements are more often than otherwise a handicap to intellectual and business progress. The high school boy who comes to college engaged to be married seldom does well in college, and is unlikely to get out of col-