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 to be excused from them, if that is the custom of the school, on account of his cleverness, and still have disciplined his mind very little. Unless he studies regularly, unless he pushes himself often to do his intellectual best, he will train his mind as inadequately as the athlete trains his body when he practices irregularly and never does his best.

"I don't see why George failed in college," I heard a mother say not long ago. "He never studied in high school, and yet he managed to get fine grades."

She did not realize that she had herself given the explanation. The high school boy who is so clever that he never has to "crack" a book, as they say, who has never submitted even for a brief time to mental drudgery, who doesn't pretty frequently settle down and dig his level best, is going to have trouble later with his brain, for sometime when he will want it to work, it will rebel like a balky ill-trained horse. It will run away from him as he ran away from his duties at home. The high school boy in many cases knows little about concentration and less about hard, consistent study. That is why he fails sometimes when he goes to college, and quite as often as not it is the clever boy in high school who fails when he gets to college.

Regular study hours, the doing of difficult things well, the holding of oneself to accuracy and rapidity of thinking, concentration of attention upon a definite problem or piece of work for a reasonable time—these are some of the


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 methods which any boy may employ for training himself to think.

A boy's body ought to be trained as well as his mind. It is, of course, possible to find illustrations of men distinguished for their intellectual achievments who have had frail, ill-developed bodies, but this is the exception and not the rule. The muscles that are developed and trained early are more easily trained and more permanently as well, for the physical skill learned in youth is soon recovered in old age, even, if apparently forgotten.

I watched a man, nearly sixty years of age, not long ago play a tennis match with a young fellow. The older man had played little in thirty years, and he seemed rather slow and awkward at first. Gradually, however, his muscles responded to the impulse of his brain; his old tricks came back to him, he recovered his serve, he placed his balls with surprising accuracy. He was winded a little, perhaps, when the set was ended, but he had won against a very worthy opponent.

The high school boy growing as quickly as he does is awkward. He will remain in that condition unless he trains his body rigidly and regularly. He should learn to swim and to row a boat and to ride a horse; to run and climb and jump. He should develop skill in as many outof-door games as possible such as golf and baseball and tennis. If he can learn to wrestle and box and dance so much the better. So far as he has control over his body he will find it easier to exercise control over his emotions.

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 The ability to stand on one's feet and speak is almost as much a matter of the body as of the mind. If a boy knows how to manage his feet and what to do with his hands and how to stand erect, he will find usually, that he has enough in his head out of which to make a pretty fair speech. Every boy in high school ought to practice sufficiently to be able to speak without having his hands shake or his knees tremble, and once he has learned, he is quite unlikely ever to forget.

I asked a very effective public speaker not long ago if his ability to speak well was natural or acquired.

"I was the shyest sort of boy," was his reply, "I stammered and hesitated and turned cold with fright whenever I got on my feet to speak. I determined, even while I was in high school, to learn to talk extemporaneously, and I forced myself to do so whenever I had a chance, and to speak as correctly and as much to the point as I could. Every boy can learn if he tries."

In addition to controlling his mind and his body, one of the most important things that a boy just entering upon youth should learn is the discipline and control of his desires and his emotions. All sorts of new emotions and desires and passions rush upon the fourteen-year-old boy, and in so far as he subdues and controls and directs these, he will become a strong man. It is his failure to do this that causes him to run away from home, or to learn to smoke and to swear and to develop habits of mind and of body that are unclean and immoral. It is as


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 often as not first from ignorance that he does these things, ignorance of the fact that it is he and not his environment that is changing. He often blames his parents or the conditions under which he lives for his discontent and unhappiness, while the truth is that all these new feelings and desires which are striving to get control of him are the result of sexual changes which are going on in his body, and which are causing him to look at life from an altogether different angle. A most important thing for him now and for the future is that he learn to control these desires and not that he let them control or subdue him.

All sorts of temptations will come to him at this time. If he can be made to understand that his body with all its parts is a sacred thing which his creator has given into his care to keep clean and strong and undefiled, if he can turn aside vulgar suggestions, if he will refrain from impure words and impure thoughts, and impure acts of all sorts, he will learn self-control of immeasurable value to him not only as a boy but as a man. For all these things sap a growing boy's strength, they reduce his vitality, they undermine his character, they make him less able to think and, worst of all, they make him far less a man.

Bad sexual habits in the developing boy are the greatest evil of which he can be guilty. They take away his initiative, they increase his self-consciousness, they rob him of his physical strength, and they weaken his mind. It


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 is only by living a clean, self-controlled sexual life that a boy can make the most of his physical and mental powers.

The boy of fourteen begins usually to take his first real interest in society when he enters high school. He is making his first real friends, and he is coming to realize for the first time the basis upon which friendship is formed. Here again self-control and discipline are necessary. A boy's friendships determine his character as much as any influence which operates in his life. Very few of us have formed alone the habits that possess us, but on the contrary we have done so in connection with one or more of our friends. When a high school boy cuts class or learns to smoke or stays out late at night or falls into any sort of irregularity, no one who has any sane knowledge of human nature ever supposes that he was alone when he did so. The fourteen-year-old forms into groups, he organizes little exclusive societies, he has his particular pals with whom he consorts and schemes and under whose influence he develops character and leadership.

In all these close relationships which grow up between boys of high school age there is invariably a leader. All make suggestions and present plans, but in every group of boys there is some one whose opinion is paramount, whose word and whose decision is law. Now at—the outset any boy may determine, negatively at least, with whom he will associate; after relationships are strongly formed, however, it is not so easy, for it is always a much more


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 simple matter to evade or to decline an association than it is to break it after it has been made. Before he enters high school a boy's friends have not always been entirely of his own choosing. They have been determined by his parents, by his immediate neighbors, by the friendships which his father and mother had made for him and with him. To a certain extent, until he shall himself go away from home, this will continue to be true, but, far more than he has ever been at liberty to do so before, he will, when he enters high school, be left very much to his own devices in the choice of his friends. It is most important that he choose wisely, for upon his choice depend his habits, his ideals, his character. If his friends develop into a fast lot, and smoke and swear and waste their time, he will be more than likely to follow; if they are quiet and studious and clean minded, he is pretty sure to adopt the same conservative tactics. A boy, as well as a man, is known by the friends he keeps, and can with the greatest difficulty follow a line of conduct different from that which these same friends follow.

"I don't have to do what they do," a boy often says when warned against certain careless or evil companions, but the facts usually prove quite the contrary, and whether he wills it or not, he soon takes up the practices that his friends set for him.

It is a great opportunity which is offered a boy who goes to high school. In these days, however, when in most communities it is the rule rather than the exception


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 for boys to go, the privilege is not infrequently valued rather lightly. The boy goes, not from any serious purpose on his own part or any special desire for training, but because it is the custom, because his parents have desired it, and because all the other boys in his class are going. Possibly it is better to go for these reasons than not to go at all, but if added to these there is also the eagerness on his part to train his mind, to add to his store of information, to prepare himself better for the work which he must take up later in life, and especially if there is for him some interest, some line of study which he very much desires to carry on, his chances of getting somewhere will be materially increased. No one can get far in any line of work without interest. The work we do without joy in the doing is pretty sure to be badly done.

Intellectual work is not unlike physical. A group of laborers is engaged upon a piece of work near my office. I can look out of my window and see them as they gather in the morning. Some of them come early and sit on the curb and smoke or talk to each other; others come up at the last minute. When the whistle sounds announcing the hour to begin, few of them go to their work with any enthusiasm or apparent pleasure. They drag themselves to their feet with reluctance, they take up their tasks with indifference, and when the twelve o'clock whistle announces quitting time, they throw down their tools with a rapidity that is disheartening. It is hardly necessary to say that they accomplish little, their progress


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 in their trade is slow. They are discontented, dissatisfied, inefficient and unhappy.

If a boy is going to high school, he should go with a spirit different from this. He is having a rare chance to develop his mind, to strengthen his character, to widen his chances of usefulness and success. This chance should inspire him to do his best, to meet and to solve his problems with courage and manliness.


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 in this new doctor. I jumped up and pushed through the brambles to the hedge that divided the preserves in which I was trespassing from our own woods, breathless because I had let it go past four and I had still to find Chris and Margaret for the doctor's visit at the half-hour.

There had been a hardening of the light while I slept that made the dear, familiar woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, tropical. The jewel-bright buds on the soot-black boughs, the blue valley distances, smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen between the black-and-white intricacies of the birch-trunks and the luminous gray pillars of the beeches, hurt my wet eyes as might beauty blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger, too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her without looking at


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When your grandfather went to high school, if fortunately he had the chance to do so, the course of study open to him was a pretty rigid one, very much indeed like an intellectual table d'hôte at which he had little opportunity to pick and choose, but must take what was set before him and ask no questions. There was a generous helping of mathematics with Latin and probably, Greek, to form the heavy part of the intellectual meal. Physics and chemistry often made up a part of the requirement, with history and English to serve as dessert to lighten the repast. There were few if any electives then, and little questioning on the part of the students as to whether or not what they were taking was likely to "do them any good" or was particularly to their individual tastes; they took their studies as they ate the simple nourishing food that was set before them at home by grandmother, in the belief that their elders knew best what was good for them.

Now everything is different. The program of study in the well-equipped modern high school carries an intellectual bill of fare as varied and as bizarre as that represented by the à la carte dining service of a first-class hotel. The boy entering high school today has so varied a program set before him, has so many things from which to choose,


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 that it is little wonder if he is not sometimes confused and at loss to know just what to choose. Unrestricted election is not possible in any high school, so far as I know, but the restrictions are so limited that the actual results amount almost to that. High school boys have so great a variety put before them that they often become over fastidious and finical in their tastes and so hard to please that they refuse to show interest in, or to cultivate an appetite for, anything. A dozen different subjects of which his grandfather would scarcely have known the names, from agronomy to pharmacy, are now found in many a high school boy's program.

Even if the boy is sensible enough to recognize the difficulty and the danger he is in, he will not always find it easy to get intelligent advice. There is a wide difference of opinion these days as to just what is best for a boy to study. There are those who think he ought to choose only what interests him, only what may be put to immediate and practical use. There is no greater educational fallacy than this insistence that we should always make a student's work interesting, and that if he can see no practical end in what he is studying, there is no logical reason why he should go on with it. He should study, the argument is, only such subjects as he finds he has special fitness and liking for. The lines of least resistance are the lines for him to follow. "Make it easy or cut it out."

A young fellow will not always get a great deal of help


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 by going to his father or his mother. They may not have had a high school experience themselves, and even if they have had, things are done very differently now from what they were twenty-five years ago, and educational affairs are managed in quite another way than when your father was young. Anyway fathers are often thought old-fashioned and tremendously behind the times by their young sons, and it is not always easy for boys to take the father's advice even if the fathers are willing to give it. Fathers, too, fall into the same educational jargon that they hear about them without always thinking seriously on the problems of education as they are presented to young boys.

Teachers, it is true, ought to be able to give dependable advice, because it is their business to know something definite about educational matters, but too many teachers are specialists, or think they are, and are too much impressed with the importance of the subject which they themselves teach to be able to give unprejudiced advice. It is a rare teacher who when asked will advise a boy against taking a subject which he himself teaches. As a result, in most cases, the boy is left to make his own decision and within the limits of his possible elections, to rely upon his own judgment as to what he shall study.

In making this choice he is pretty likely to be influenced by popular opinion, by what some of the other fellows are taking, and by his own personal tastes and tendencies. Few people would work if circumstances did not require it, and fewer still would voluntarily choose to do disa-


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 greeable or unpleasant things, and a young boy least of all is likely to do so. Very naturally, then, if allowed to determine his own program, he picks out what he likes best, not stopping to inquire whether or not what gives him the most pleasure is likely to do him the most good. "Why did you drop chemistry?" I asked a neighbor boy in high school not long ago.

"I didn't care for it," was his reply, "and I don't see any reason in studying anything I don't care for, do you?"

I really did, and I tried to tell him that every one has all through life, every day usually, to do many things that are not pleasing, and that the sooner one begins, the easier the task becomes.

He shies, often at what he considers difficult. If he reasons badly, he avoids, as far as possible, mathematics and chemistry and physics. If he has a poor verbal memory he passes up Latin and modern languages arguing when questioned on the subject, that he can get just as much good out of something else that he finds more to his liking. If he finds spelling difficult or the composition of themes puzzling he dodges such work as well as he can and explains his course of action by saying that he "never could spell or write a good theme, anyway." He fails in doing so to recognize the fact that one of the main purposes of education is to help him to do more easily these and other things which he may find hard to do. A


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 normal mind can be made to work successfully along almost any line, if the boy to whom it belongs will apply himself persistently to the difficult subject. There is nothing so sure in any sort of endeavor to bring defeat as the admission at the outset that defeat is very probable, and there is no intellectual joy so sweet as the successful accomplishment of a task that was thought difficult or impossible. The boy who says he is going to fail seldom does anything else.

Just the other day a boy was telling me, with the greatest exultation showing in his face, of his experience with what the teacher had called "the hardest problem in the book." The boy did not find mathematics easy, often he was satisfied with working the simpler problems at the beginning of the assignment trusting to luck that he would not be called upon to explain any of the "stickers" when it came to the recitation. This time, however, his ambition was stirred, his "spunk was up," he said, and he determined he would work that problem if it took all night. Well, it did take mighty nearly all night, but he stuck to it, and got it right, and the joy of mental conquest was a satisfaction and an inspiration to him for the rest of his high school course. So is it to every boy who struggles. The benefits of such accomplishments, too, will not end with a boy's graduation from high school. Forty years afterwards he will still be able to feel the self-reliance which he gained through his boyish conquest of difficulty; forty years afterwards he will be stronger to


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 meet unexpected trials by having overcome this mental hardship.

"What are you going to take next half year?" I asked Donald at mid-year.

"I don't know," he replied. "Do you know any snap course?"

The snap, whatever it is, will get a boy nowhere excepting to give him credits, and what one ought to want out of four years of high school is training that will make one happier and more able to think and that will fit one better to do the hard but necessary things of life.

Next to the interesting and the easy, the practical is what now appeals to the majority of boys. There is no sort of bunkum in educational matters that appeals now so strongly to the public as that which is presented with the label "practical" on it. It is like the old "made in Germany" which used so to appeal to us when we found it on an article in which we were interested, and it is about as cheap and worthless in its significance. Our high school courses are crammed full of subjects which are supposed to be eminently practical and which will assist those who have taken them almost immediately to make money or to get a job or to do something. Typewriting, stenography, cooking, dressmaking, millinery, plumbing, typesetting, manual training, pharmacy, business English and business arithmetic, whatever these last two subjects may be, may all be found in one or another


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 of our high school curricula, and they appeal very strongly, some of them, to boys, because they suggest an immediate use and application of knowledge.

I am not now meaning to imply that many of them are not of use; in fact very likely each is of some benefit and may be put to immediate use more readily, apparently at least, than a good many other subjects which are in the high school course. They are more easily learned, however; they require less brain power, and they are more quickly forgotten than are those subjects that require concentration of mind and logical reasoning.

"Of what possible use could Latin be to me?" George protested the other day when his father was advising him to include it in his high school course. "I'm not going to teach, I'm not going to be a lawyer, and nobody talks Latin these days."

There is a curious, though possibly an explainable, point of view with many young people now-a-days that only the teacher or the lawyer could ever find any use for so dead a language as Latin—the teacher because everybody expects him to have had the subject, and the lawyer because many legal terms are still expressed in Latin, and the lawyer is supposed to know how to translate them. I suppose the real facts are that neither of these men needs Latin in his business more than any other intelligent or educated person does.

I am no special advocate of foreign languages, and especially of dead languages, and have no special fluency


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NCE upon a time there were two children, a little boy named Willie and a little girl named Annie. Now, they could hardly wait for Santa Claus to visit them, so every day they would say to their mother, “Oh, Mother, how many days until Christmas? Must we wait a whole month, Mother? Twenty days more, ten days more, only five days more,—how slowly the days drag on, Mother!”

Now, the busy mother felt the time slip by all too rapidly, but the children counted the


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 either in reading or speaking any one. I have had some training in three languages besides my native tongue, but if I am in any degree able to estimate the relative benefits to me of the various subjects which I pursued preparatory to entering college I have no hesitancy in saying that my study of Latin meant more to me than anything else I did and means more to me today. History bored me, so I worked very little at it; mathematics required little study on my part, so though I received high grades in it I really derived little discipline from it, science I liked, but it did not require any strenuous effort to get by the examinations. Latin was to me the most difficult of all. I toiled at it; I dug out laboriously each word and phrase and sentence; I committed my declensions and my paradigms with painful slowness, but I held myself to the task, and I accomplished it with rather more than average success.

I can read today, after thirty years, with some fluency every Latin text I ever studied. I got more idea of concentration and accuracy and coördination out of the subject than from anything else. It was the one thing that gave me mental discipline; it was the thing that required of me most serious study. Perhaps it might not accomplish the same result for others; perhaps for you that result would be brought about through some other means; but for me, it was the Latin that did it, so when I hear a boy say, "What possible good could Latin do me?" I tell him my story, and I try to show him


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 that it will do for him what it did for me if he will go at it with a determination to do it well.

I once heard a practical man, one of the leading engineers of the country in fact, and a man trained at a well-known technical school in New England, make the statement that if he were given the privilege of going to school or college again he would never elect anything that was considered practical. What he really meant, he explained, was that as he saw education it is not for immediate and practical use so much as for training and discipline of the mind, for the development of ideals, for the setting of standards. High school is not so much to give a boy specific information as it is so to prepare him to get that information for himself if he ever needs it, and needing it that he may have a brain sufhiciently well trained intelligently to use the information when he gets it.

Of course it would be quite unwise and even untrue to assert that the practical things one finds in a high school course do not in a measure conduce to discipline and training of the mind. Many of them are both practical and disciplinary, but as a rule the so-called practical subjects that are more and more creeping into the high school course and that make the strongest appeal to the boy and quite as often to his parents, have little disciplinary value, have less cultural value, and are seldom used practically after the boy leaves high school. The boy who is fed-up on these subjects often has a hard


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 time when he is called upon to work out problems which require logical and consistent thinking.

Sometimes, too, a boy is tempted to "specialize" in electing his course in high school. He makes up his mind to prepare for a definite line of work, and he begins early to load up his course with all that is offered in a single department of work. This is usually an unwise thing to do. It gives a one-sided training, it develops a rather badly balanced mind. The boy who runs to languages, or to commercial subjects, or to drawing and manual training because he likes these subjects, or because he thinks they will better prepare him for a specific sort of work, even though he is allowed to graduate from high school on such a specialized program, has missed the vital purpose of a high school course. After he has been taught to think, after he has laid a broad foundation, a boy can specialize to much better advantage in anything he likes.

So far I have seemed to be satisfied with condemning certain practices followed in choosing a course in high school, without giving much suggestion as to what is best to do. It is a foolish man, however, who spends his energies entirely in condemning and tearing down and who does not suggest something definite and constructive.

There is a certain necessary preparation which every boy should get in high school if he intends to go to college or if he is looking forward to a specific sort of work. The college entrance requirements are now about as flexible as they are likely to be made for a while, and they are


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 plumber. Their most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had submitted to it as a good-natured man submits to being blindfolded at a children's party, and under its influence had recovered his memory and his middle-aged personality, had talked of Kitty with the humorous tenderness of the English husband, and had looked possessively about him. But as his mind came out of the control he exposed their lie that they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process by pushing away this knowledge and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know. I had accepted that it would always be so. But at that moment I had so great a need to throw off my mood of despair, so insupportably loaded with all the fantastic images to which my fevered mind transmuted the facts of our tragedy, that I filled myself with a gasping, urgent faith


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 about as liberal as any high school course ought to be, and yet, if one is to enter college, there are a few things which are essential in all cases, and in technical colleges there are additional requirements. For instance one can not enter any course in engineering without having a fairly thorough foundation in mathematics and physics. At least a year and a half of algebra are required with a year of plane geometry and a half year of solid geometry. Some institutions require in addition advanced algebra and trigonometry. Every high school principal is acquainted with this fact and ought to make it evident to his students, though he does not always do so. If the boy has the foresight to inquire he will undoubtedly get the information he desires, but every year I find fellows who wish to enter a course in college for which they do not have the requirements, and these requirements, had they known them, they might very easily have met.

The man who expects later in college to go on with English or chemistry or foreign language should at least find out the minimum requirements in these subjects, for entrance to college, and should meet them, so that he may not later be handicapped on account of not having done the thing which he could easily have accomplished.

There are a great many people who maintain that there is a vast difference between preparing for college and preparing for life. These people hold that because one does not expect to enter college after he is through with high school, he is therefore excusable if he omits from


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 his course such subjects as do not appeal to him either as interesting or as practical. There is in their arguments the inference that college entrance requirements are unreasonable or freakish, or that they do not furnish a young fellow with the training that will be of any material value, or at least of the greatest value to him, should he not go to college. I believe that quite the contrary is true, and that the course prescribed for entrance to college is on the whole as good a course as a boy can select no matter what he intends doing. Such a course will teach him logical thinking, and the ability to think is quite as necessary out of college as in it; whatever one undertakes and carries through that causes him to think is of the greatest advantage to him in any later enterprise. Since no boy is likely while he is in high school absolutely to know that he will or will not go to college, the safest plan would seem to be so to choose his course in high school that he may meet the college entrance requirements should he ever want to do so.

Every boy should undertake something in high school that he finds hard to do, something that will make him bring his books home at night and do a little studying after school hours. There is always a question about the training the boy is getting who never has to do any studying at home, who never finds anything that causes him to dig, who does not know what it means to work his brain at times as hard as it is capable of working. If you will ask any man, young or old, out of what experience, mental


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 or physical, he has received the most valuable training he will almost invariably answer that it was from the experience which forced him to work the hardest. It is through vigorous and regular exercise that any muscle or any faculty is developed.

I knew "Mike" Mason before he entered high school; and "Mike" developed later into the best two-miler the Western Conference has ever had. He had no special talents athletically at the outset, unless one should admit that persistence and willingness to work hard and to sacrifice whenever it is necessary are special talents. Mike wanted to be a good runner, and he was willing to pay the price. He trained regularly all through his high school course; he worked hard when other boys, some of them as good prospects as he, perhaps, had long ago given up the contest and had gone over to join the rooters on the bleachers; he worked hard when hard work was far from pleasant; he gave up everything that seemed to interfere with his prospects, but when he was ready for college he was beginning to be counted as one of the coming athletes of the state, and before he graduated he was known as the best runner of the middle west. And it was largely through hard work, through doing his best, through his willingness constantly to tackle something hard that Mike trained his muscles and developed his mind, and outstripped his competitors in the race.

Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, of New York, in a recent address to young people said, "If you are starting out


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 to make a success in life, don't choose the job that offers you the easiest time or the most money. Choose rather the one that requires the hardest work and furnishes the greatest opportunity for your development." Now a boy trains his mind as he learns a profession or trains his muscles, by putting it to the test and seeing what it can regularly do when it is pushed. It is for this reason that I should advise a boy, no matter what his regular curriculum in the high school may be, always to select some course that will give his mind a good work out.

I heard an architect say once that to be worth much in his profession an architect had to be able to do his work rapidly and to do it well. There are a great many people, he alleged, who can turn out a lot of work in a short time, but it proves inaccurate or worthless; there are a great many others whose work is beautifully and carefully done, but it takes them all summer to get anything accomplished. Neither sort of person will get far in his profession. Out of his high school course every boy should learn concentration—that is the ability to center the mind on a definite piece of work and to bring it to completion within a definite and reasonable time. Some boys learn this trick more easily than others, but it is quite possible for every boy so to acquire control of his mind that it will accomplish what he wants it to do within the time at his disposal. Possibly the best way to bring this about is through setting for himself mental "stunts" and trying to see in how short a time these may be satis-


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 factorily accomplished, just as when we were boys we used to set for ourselves physical tasks.

"If you will get the potatoes hoed by three o'clock," mother used to say to us boys, "you can go fishing for the rest of the afternoon."

How quickly conversation and youthful horseplay stopped; the weeds fell before our devastating hoes like the Huns before the marines. We plied our task with a vigor and a persistency that brought it to a glorious finish with time to spare before three o'clock.

It is so that a boy ought to learn to drive his mind, yet few young fellows come to college or go out from high school into life with much idea of mental concentration or much training in it. Their minds have a tendency to jump from one thing to another with the skill of an acrobat. They find it difficult to concentrate their attention on a single subject for fifteen minutes, and, both in high school and college, they are handicapped by this lack of mental control.

The best student I have ever known was so not so much from superior quality or alertness of mind as from his unusual ability to concentrate and hold his attention on what he was doing. He could get more done in an hour than most fellows could accomplish in two. When he settled to his books nothing moved him or diverted his attention. He would sit for an hour never stirring a muscle excepting as he had to turn the pages of the book he was reading. When he was at work he neither spoke


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 to his companions nor seemed to take any account of what they are doing or saying. This is a quality of mind which every boy would do well to cultivate, and it is a quality which can be developed through effort and practice.

A boy should get a certain breadth of view from his high school course. It should take him to other countries than his own and to other worlds. It should interest him in the great people and the great movements of thought of the world, and should stimulate in him a desire to read and to know more and to see more of what the world contains. It should be for him the beginning and not the end of an interest in history and science, and literature; in inventions and discoveries, and manufactures. If it is to do this, the boy must have shown interest in more than one subject in the high school; he must have done more than merely pass in the various subjects which he has elected; he must be taken out of his own narrow environment, his interest and his breadth of view must be broadened, and he must see life as a different and a better thing than it was before he took up a high school course.

A boy should get from his high school course better taste, better manners, more interest in poetry and music and art and whatever is idealistic and beautiful. He should be less selfish than when he began his course of study, more interested in other people, more ambitious.

Besides choosing subjects that will require hard work, that will develop concentration, broaden his view and


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 develop his taste and his ideals, every boy should regularly have something in his course of study that he likes. Doing what one likes may not always be so profitable but it is more interesting than doing the difficult. Life, and especially high school life, should not be all drudgery or it will fail of its main purpose Every day's work—should be looked forward to with interest and pleasure, and this can be only when the program of studies is in some part at least pleasing to the boy. We have all eaten the carrots or the common bread and butter we had no taste for in order that we might the sooner get at the dessert which we so much more enjoyed, and we shall often find the same condition existing in the boy's attitude toward his high school course. He will stand a certain amount of unpleasant work provided there is mixed up with it something he enjoys.

The question of carrying an over-schedule often comes up. Some boys say that they always do their best work when they are carrying the heaviest intellectual load. This means that only when they are under pressure, when they are being urged on by surrounding conditions do they develop concentration and conservation of their time. It is undoubtedly true that for some temperaments this sort of goading is most conducive to good work. The less some boys have to do, the less they will do, and vice versa. Simons was one of that sort. When he carried a light schedule he loafed and cut class and fooled away his time generally. It was only when his teacher told


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 him that he had no shadow of a chance to pass that he got down to business. When he was metaphorically pushed against the wall with some one at his throat, he roused himself and fought for his life, and he usually won the contest. He was like a man who really never makes an effort to swim until he thinks himself drowning.

Under ordinary circumstances a normal schedule is best. There is little to be gained from finishing high school ahead of one's class. It is pretty hard if not practically impossible to develop in a boy of sixteen the judgment and the power of thinking that we expect him to have at eighteen. The time element counts more than we are often willing to admit, and the high school course finished in three years is quite often worth no more than seventy-five per cent of the same course pursued normally and completed in four years. If a boy has been unlucky, if he is behind his class, then it is sometimes an advantage for him to speed up by carrying more than the normal amount. In most cases, however, it is a mistake for him to do so. A normal schedule gives a boy time to think, time to read, time to do his work well. It is always better to do a moderate amount of work with credit than to skim indifferently through twice as much. The boy who just gets by misses the most of the good that he might get out of his course.

The high school course for a very large number of boys is the end of their formal educational training; they go no further excepting as they acquire training from the


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 practical experiences of business or industrial life. A boy should carry away from high school then, something more than a diploma inscribed with a list of the subjects he has pursued. He should have grounded himself in the elements of a number of subjects, he should have learned at least the beginnings of logical thinking and be ready to solve whatever problem is put to him, he should have some knowledge of literature, he should know how to write a correct sentence, and he should not count either reading or writing a task but rather a pleasure. His high school course should have prepared him for entrance to college, or, if that privilege is denied him, it should have given him a helpful and satisfactory training for entering upon the practical duties of life.


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Kenneth, my next door neighbor, who is a senior in high school, has a habit of dropping in on me every few days to talk things over. He is a healthy normal young fellow of seventeen who generally gets on well with his teachers; whose work is being creditably done if his final grades are any indication of success, and who has as little fault to find with the world as the average boy of his age who has no responsibilities and who has never made sacrifices.

We discuss all sorts of topics, from the probable future of the Bolsheviki to the latest bill at the Orpheum, but I am rather interested to notice that unless I drag in the topic myself he seldom has anything to say of his studies. Physics, Vergil, Shakspere, and history engage his thoughts, or are supposed to do so, five days in the week, but he seldom of his own volition makes these the topic of conversation, unless it be to rail against one or the other of them. He talks freely of the football team, of his own accomplishments and possibilities as a member of it, and of the determination of the eleven to clean up Springfield and win a championship. He is interested slightly in the fortunes of the high school debating team, although debate to him is about as manly a sport as knit ting for the soldiers. He dilates at length on the success of


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 the last high school dance, and when I ask him sympathetically about Clara, I know that I have opened up a topic that can not be anything like adequately discussed at one sitting. The incidental things connected with his high school life seem to him the most interesting and the most vital. He gives considerable time and thought to the "other things" but, outside of class at least, none to his studies.

I am convinced that he is not unique in this respect. Although I have no boys of my own, I have frequently had them in my household. I have for some time, also, acted as guardian to two young fellows who are in a western academy of standing, and from them I receive weekly letters, usually written with the ostensible purpose of giving me information with regard to the intellectual, and physical progress of the writers, but actually to offer an opportunity to ask that their regular allowances be increased or at least not delayed in transit. In these letters I get no discussion of studies, and seldom any reference to them. Were it not for the friendly communications of the principal, and the regular bills for school supplies which I receive, I should have no knowledge, even, of what subjects, the boys are pursuing. Their letters are made up chiefly of optimistic predictions as to their athletic successes, of accounts of escapades (harmless of course, and quite within the regulations of the school), of dramatics, and of anticipated pleasures at social functions with the Ferry Hall girls. Even the attaining of a high


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 there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.

I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking of the globe and cried out, "Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert Anderson must cure him." Heaven knows that I had no reason for faith in any doctor, for during the last week so many of them, as sleek as seals with their neatly brushed hair and their frock-coats, had stood round Chris and looked at him with the consequenceless deliberation of a


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 grade, which is a rare enough occurrence, may not be mentioned at all. At Christmas or Easter time when they visit me, I find that the dullest topic of conversation which I can introduce is studies.

I am not suggesting that this is out of the normal; it is, perhaps, quite in accord with the principle that the thing which touches us most deeply and which is closest to our hearts we are sometimes least likely to speak about. Possibly the high school boy considers it "shop" and thinks that he gets enough of it in the regular daily routine, and had best forget it when away from it. Possibly there is a certain feeling that one who talks about his studies is likely to be thought a grind, and however creditable it may be to work like a Trojan at football or track or baseball or in getting ready for a class dance, it has not yet become so generally popular through regular persistent effort to excel at one's studies. Why, I have never known. If one excels in his studies, it is in the minds of most boys creditable only if one does so without hard work, and it is not a thing to boast about like breaking the school record in the quarter mile.

Notwithstanding all this, however, a boy's studies constitute his business during the four years he is in high school. They are the main thing. They ought to have his best effort and his best thought. Father thinks so; most of the neighbors feel that way; his teachers have no doubt of it. No matter how good an appearance you make at the Junior dance, no matter how widely advertised you


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 are as a pole vaulter or how enchantingly you warble on the Glee Club, if you do not carry your work creditably at the end of the semester, you are a failure so far as high school is concerned. It isn't enough that you make the debating team or are elected class president or are known as the most popular boy in school; it's the studies that count.

Too many boys go to high school without much definite purpose. They expect to go to college, and high school is part of the necessary routine for the accomplishment of that result. All the other fellows are going, and it is easier to go than not to do so. They would rather continue going to school, as one boy told me, than go to work; and soit goes. If they were asked what their reasons are—if any boy who is reading this essay were to ask himself—the answer would in all probability be that they "wanted an education," whatever that may mean. I am not sure that with all the experience I have had and with all the definitions I have read, I could myself give an adequate explanation of what education really means, but I am sure that it means in some degree training of the mind, and that such training comes through application and regular rigid exercise of the brain, through the accomplishing of mental tasks that are not easy and not always pleasant. Every young boy knows that if he expects to amount to anything as an athlete he must train regularly and persistently, that he must deny himself many things which he would otherwise enjoy, and that he must not only constantly do his best, but that he must be striving all the


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 time to make his best better. It is with some such spirit as this that a boy should go at his studies. He will never do very well unless he learns concentrated hard work. He will never increase his ability to think as he should unless he tries to do well a good many things he doesn't like to do.

If possible, have an object in view. Set some intellectual goal for yourself, and do not be satisfied until you have reached that point or gone beyond it. You will find, usually, that you can attain success more easily in some directions than in others. Do not be satisfied to be commonplace or merely to pass, but make up your mind that in some line or other you are going to be as good as the best at least, for your success in any one line of endeavor will always give you more likelihood of success in anything else which you may undertake. The boy who gets away creditably with a difficult course in mathematics or with an examination in Vergil which he finds distasteful, will be so much the better able through self-confidence and persistence to win the girl of his choice or to make a creditable record at track. As you do well the intellectual tasks which are set for you today, you will accomplish more easily and more accurately the duties which are laid upon you twenty years from now, no matter what these duties may be.

By far the largest percentage of poor work or of failures in high school comes not from the fact that boys are stupid or badly prepared in the elementary schools, or be-


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 cause the amount of work they are asked to do is unreasonable or beyond their grasp, but because they do not do their work seriously or thoroughly at first; they have no well-organized plan of study; they are procrastinating, and wake up to the fact too late, that their studies are a real business to which they should have been giving regular attention from the beginning. Jones told me only yesterday that if he had learned his conjugations and his declensions carefully and thoroughly when he began his high school study of Latin, he would have been saved years of uncertain floundering through the classics. If you would give more careful attention to elementary algebra, you would not have heart failure later when you take the required courses in college mathematics. If boys took their work as seriously in September as they do in January or immediately before the final examinations there would be a great many more honor students than failures.

As a rule the task set for the average high school student is a very moderate one, and the amount and the character of the work required quite within the range of his ability. I have known a great many high school boys, but I have known few whose mental equipment was not adequate to the accomplishment of the work they had elected to do if they had gone at it in the right way when it was assigned. The number of "boneheads" is pretty limited.

Have a regular time for study. Of course I appreciate the fact that most high schools have "study periods" between recitations and that a good many boys depend


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 upon these to furnish adequate time for preparation, or if this should prove inadequate there is always the chance of studying ahead in class and being ready to recite when the teacher calls upon you, but this method is either inadequate or a subterfuge and will not get you anywhere.

"John is so quick at his books," his fond mother tells me, "he never has to study." But I know John is coming up against a great surprise one of these days, for the boy who expects to get what he should out of his studies, ought to have at least a little regular time for hard study at home every day. The boy who never needs to open a book at home may be a bright boy, but he will seldom develop into a well-trained man; he is pretty sure to prove commonplace.

Learn to do things within the time assigned to you. If there are problems to be handed in on Monday, do not put off solving them until the last minute and then have to give an excuse because you did not have time enough to finish them. If your theme is due on Thursday go at it early enough to get it done by that time. The boy who waits for an inspiration or who thinks it will be easier for him to write tomorrow than it is tonight, is more than likely to be fooled. No one but a poet ever waits for an inspiration, and the fellow who gets into the habit of delaying the doing of his work until he feels like it, soon finds that his eagerness for work constantly decreases, while the boy who goes at his work and gets it done in time no matter how he feels about it,


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 discovers before long that he can work whenever he wants to do so. No man who has regular routine work to do can allow it to be a matter of inspiration or feeling. One of the main things for which brains are trained is that they may be made to work easily whenever the necessity arises.

Perhaps the reason why boys court delay in the accomplishment of assigned work is because there is so much time in which it may be done, and the task set for tomorrow seems so much easier of accomplishment than that which confronts us today; but work always grows more difficult as we allow it to pile up, and one is not, in general, likely to have more time tomorrow than he has today.

Learn to depend upon your own efforts for the accomplishment of your work. I know that there is a certain comradeship developed between two boys who get their work together, and it is sometimes a tremendous timesaver, but it is very seldom best. If the result of study were accomplished when we got the answer to the problem, all that would sometimes be necessary would be to turn to the back of the book. The boy who works out his own problems, as he will usually have to do later in life, develops self-reliance, learns to trust his own judgment, gets the habit of standing on his own feet, and is the more likely to be honest and self-reliant at examination time. If you and Tom are working out the problems in algebra together there is always the tempta-


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 days on the calendar and grew more and more impatient each day. At last they shouted in glee, “Santa Claus will visit us to-night, and to-morrow is Merry Christmas!”

They borrowed the longest, strongest stockings which they could find, and when their mother came to tuck them snugly in bed and to kiss them good-night, Willie said, “Do you know, Mother, I’m going to prop my eyelids wide open and watch all night for Santa Claus.”

“So am I,” said Annie, “and when he comes down the chimney, we will ask him where he gets all the toys.”

“Oh, no, you must go right to sleep and he will come all the faster,” answered the mother, as she turned out the lights and left the nursery.


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 tion to utilize his work as your own, to trade answers, and in reality to slight half the work. If it is translation instead of mathematics that is being worked out, the poorer student soon learns to rely upon the better and misses the training which comes from working out a hard task alone.

Regularity of work counts for a tremendous lot in any line of business. Once get behind, and the damage is almost irreparable. I was talking to a discouraged high school sophomore today.

"I was a good student last year," he said, "and I'm sure I have brains enough to get on. I had rather light work this half year, and I should have carried it easily. I simply loafed and let the work pile up expecting to do it all in the end. When I awoke to my situation the pile was more than I could crawl over."

Unless any boy at the very beginning learns to work regularly, he will have a hard time to learn later. It is almost impossible to play the ant after one has long been cast in the rôle of the grasshopper.

It is not enough that a boy work regularly, he must apply himself to his work with concentration of mind. The fellow who puts in the most hours is not necessarily the best student. It is the one who works regularly and works hard as well—who has his whole mind on what he is doing—who will accomplish the most and who will get the best development out of his work. As I write this paper, I have been watching a young fellow sitting


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 on the porch across the street from my office window, a book in his hand and his chair tilted back against the house wall. He is whistling to a passing dog now; he was engaged in conversation with a mate a few moments ago; he hailed the ice cream cone man and did business with him at the beginning of the hour; and yet he will tell his friends at dinner time how hard he was grinding at his lessons all the afternoon.

One of the poorest students with whom I have had to do was as regular in his work as the phases of the moon and as sure to be at his book as taxes, but he worked too much, and he had no concentration. He would go to sleep while writing his theme as readily as I did while reading it. He worked without method and without application, and so he failed to carry anything. The best student I have ever known—and by that I mean not only the man who was best in his studies, but in the "other things"—put in a very few hours at his work, but he studied every night, and when he worked his whole mind was directed toward what he wished to accomplish; he did not let anything come between him and what he was doing, and when he was through, he stopped and put his work away. He had more leisure time at his disposal than any of the rest of us. He won through regularity and concentration, and these qualities are usually to be discovered when a man, high school student or otherwise, succeeds. It is possible to learn concentration. One must have interest, he must have the will to


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 do, and he must be wide-awake enough to realize what it is that he is trying to accomplish.

But the "other things" are important; only slightly less important in fact than the studies themselves. However much a boy may be devoted to his work he can not study all the time, and he should not be allowed to do so even if it were possible. As I remember my own secondary school course and try to estimate, as it is impossible justly to do, its present worth to me, I am inclined to value most highly some of the things that were connected only remotely with the studies I was pursuing. These external things naturally would have been of little value to me unless I had carried the work I was taking, for matters were so conducted in our home circle that a place would readily have been found for me on the farm had I shown any chronic inaptitude in securing grades. But granting that ability, these "other things" seem to me of the greatest value. As an instructor I can seldom find much excuse for the boy who does not carry his work in high school; but the one who does not do more than this, no matter how high his scholastic standing may be, has missed a very large part of what every one should get from high school training. School life is very much a community life. No one can justly live to himself alone, and profit greatly from the life. He has his own private individual work to do, it is true, and he should do it; but he has also his obligations to his fellow students and to the community at large, and these he may not shirk.


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 I heard a boy once boast that during his high school course he had never cut a class nor seen an athletic contest. I am not sure that either fact was a virtue, and notwithstanding that he now wears a badge won by high scholastic attainments, I think that his training and his sympathies might have been broader if his school interests had, perhaps, been varied enough to make it desirable for him sometimes to cut a class, or interesting to attend a ball game. I think his influence now would be wider. A boy's studies should give him familiarity with ideas, and training in principles; and "other things" in which he interests himself should make him acquainted with people, and furnish him some opportunity to get experience in the management of erratic human beings. Whether the business which a young man finally takes up happens to be designing gas engines or preaching the gospel, he will find daily opportunities for the exercise of both sorts of training.

It is a somewhat overworked and jaded joke that class valedictorians generally bring up as street car conductors or as hack drivers, not that I should like to underestimate the value of any one of these positions or the amount of intelligence required successfully to perform the work of either one of these worthy offices—and though, perhaps, it is a joke, one can occasionally find instances of students of the highest scholastic standing filling the most commonplace positions simply from lack of initiative or ability to assume leadership. One such dropped in on me only a few


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 days ago. I did not remember him at first; he seemed commonplace, unaggressive, without diplomacy. When he mentioned his name I recalled that he had been valedictorian of his class a dozen years ago. He had got nowhere; he had lost every position he had held because he had no ability at leadership; he could not adjust himself to the peculiarities of other people. He was always at loggerheads with his boss. The lack of ability to get on with men often keeps a young fellow as it had kept him, from an opportunity to utilize his educational stock in trade. Social training then, association with man, is a very desirable thing.

There are many ways in which such an association may be cultivated. The ordinary method which simply for the sake of enjoyment takes a boy out among his fellows—and sometimes his fellows' sisters—is neither to be ignored nor worked too strenuously. Parties and picnics, social calls, and long quiet strolls when the moon is full are, in moderation, helpful, perhaps, but they should not be developed into a regular practice. Even a good thing may be overdone. It is exceedingly desirable that one should learn how to manage his hands and feet and tongue, but it is quite possible to devote too much time to acquiring skill of this sort. The boy who omits all social life makes a mistake; the fellow who devotes a large part of his time to it is mushy.

I have a strong belief in the value of athletics. It is true that some of the poorest students I have ever known


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 have called themselves athletes because their main interest was physical rather than intellectual, but I have known more good students than poor ones who have been prominent in athletic events. The boy who goes into athletics sanely has a good chance of developing a strong body; both tradition and necessity demand that he live a temperate, healthy life, and his thinking powers and his ability to do mental work are likely to be stimulated by the regular exercise he must take. It is true that few students ever do themselves damage from working too hard, but a great many develop chronic indigestion and physical worthlessness from sitting in stuffy rooms and taking no exercise. I should not go so far as to say that the athlete is usually a better student than the fellow who does not go in for such things, but he is usually a better allaround man than the other fellow. He has more stamina and endurance, and because of his symmetrical development he is more likely to make a success later in life than boys who have had no such training. For this reason as well as for the pleasure and relaxation in it, every student who can should go in for some athletic game.

There are a good many societies in high school which will bid for the boy's time and attendance. Many very worthy people think most of these are wholly bad, and advise the boy to steer clear of them all as he would dodge smallpox and the tax collector. Most of these organizations have their uses, however, and in the majority of cases they are good. Most boys would be helped by


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 the front, at the end of a straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud flats made steel-bright with floods pitted by the soft, slow rain. There, past a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off plaster and uncovered rafters that stick out like broken bones. There are people still living here. A slouchy woman sits at the door of a filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arm at some passing soldiers. And at another house there is a general store with strings of orange onions and bunches of herbs hanging from the roof, a brown gloom rich with garlic and humming with the flies that live all the year round in French village shops, a black cat rubbing her sleepiness against the lintel. It is in there that Chris is standing, facing across the counter an old man in a blouse, with a scar running white into the gray thickets


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 joining a debating society both on account of the personal associations which they would cultivate, and for the training it would give them in speaking and writing. It is a great asset to be able to say easily what one has in his mind. Dramatics, declamation contests, musical organizations, stunt shows in general give one a training which will later in life repay many times the effort entailed in the practice for these activities.

There are political opportunities in high school which should not be overlooked. Class officers and managerships must be filled. Such work offers an excellent chance for the development of business sense and business experience, and for widening one's influence and control of men. The necessary relationships which political activity requires develop resourcefulness, shrewdness, and a general understanding of human nature. It gives training in organizing men, in planning operations, in meeting unexpected situations. It is one of the best experiences a boy can have. It is often, too, a strong test of a boy's character, for, even in high school politics, there is constant opportunity for graft, for trickery, and for dishonesty. The boy who goes through such a contest and comes out clean has had a test and a training which will prove invaluable to him.

The four years you are in high school should mean something more than the mere acquaintance with facts, or the acquiring of information or the passing of examinations; it should give you a knowledge of other


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 boys. But in getting this second sort of training you will usually have to choose between several of many interests. If you elect to do one thing, you must usually omit the rest. A fellow may occasionally be president of his class and at the same time captain of the football team, but ordinarily one of these positions is quite sufficient to occupy his leisure moments. If you try too much, you will fail in all. If you get into the real life of the school and do something to direct its current, you will usually be better fitted to meet the unexpected in the more strenuous world into which you must go when you enter college or take up the practical work of life, than you would be if you simply did your school work and stayed in you own little shell.


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Most students in high school quite seriously believe that examinations have been devised by teachers merely to torture a group of defenseless young people. They see in examinations neither pleasure nor benefit, they look forward to their approach with premonition and pain, and give a relieved sigh when each series of examinations is safely past.

"The teacher knows what a fellow will do before he takes an examination," the high school boy argues, "so why can't he let it go at that and give a man a grade without working him to a shadow or scaring him to death in getting ready for an examination?"

When I was in college we had a shrewd old instructor, lazy we thought him at times, whom we could never quite make out. His grades were always in the college office within a surprisingly short time after the examination had ceased, so that there was a suspicion in the minds of a good many of us that he never read his examination papers at all, but dumped them into the waste paper basket and went home to enjoy his cigar.

The trouble was that no one quite liked to take the risk to prove his suspicion. We threatened often to test out our theories by not studying for the quiz and by writing down any sort of bunk that came into our heads


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 when we got into the classroom, but these threats seldom got further than talk. Fred Waterman tried it once and flunked the course, whether because the old man read the paper and discovered Fred's trick, or because he had already scheduled Fred for defeat, we could never quite determine. As it was the majority of us went on boning up for the examination and sweating through it, fearful that after all that the instructor might read the papers. I always meant to ask him after I got out of college whether he did or not, but I could never quite get up my nerve. I can see now that whether he read them or not made very little difference. He was a good judge of human nature. He knew us well enough so as seldom to do us any especial intellectual injustice, and he kept—us guessing so that we had to make the review and the preparation that he wanted us to make.

The boy is right who says that the teacher generally knows pretty well beforehand what his students are worth and what they will know on an examination. The teacher is just as sure, however, if heis any judge of human nature, that it is the getting ready for the examination and the actually taking of it that makes the boy sure of what he knows. If he knew that he did not have to take an examination the boy would seldom make any special mental effort. Our old high school trainer used to know pretty well what Jim Whalen would do in the race for which he was practicing, though Jim seldom made any remarkable showing before the time of actual contest.


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 After she had gone downstairs, Willie whispered to Annie, “Say, Annie, are you awake?”

“Yes, I am, but I’m getting so sleepy I wish he would hurry and come right now. Let’s sing our Christmas carols for him.” And so the two children sang all the songs they knew.

“My, it does seem so long to wait. I am most asleep,” said Willie, with a big yawn. “I tell you, we can take turns—you watch for him awhile, Annie, and then I shall.” After a time Annie called out, “Willie, I’m so sleepy; it’s your turn to watch.” But she received no answer.

The next thing they knew, Annie and Willie were away up in the North Pole country, with snow and ice around them on all sides, and right in front of them stood a high ice-


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 It was the thought of the race itself that put nerve into Jim. It was the contact with the other fellows and the stimulus of competition that urged him on and made him win. Jim would never have been much of a runner unless he had been put into a race, and no one knew the fact better than the trainer. It is the same way with a boy in examinations.

A good many schools follow the practice of excusing from final examinations all students whose daily work averages above a certain grade. I know a good many high school boys who have never taken a final examination and who would not know how to do so creditably. It is a perfectly easy matter, if he is alert while in the classroom and regular in his class attendance, for a boy to keep his daily grades up and still to have very little general grasp of the subject. I have just answered a letter from the father of one of our freshmen in college. The boy has been dropped at the end of his first year for poor scholarship, and the father finds it difficult to understand why.

"George was always a good student in the high school," he wrote. "He never had to take an examination, and I can not see why he had done so badly in college."

In college George was required in his final examination to present a general view of the whole subject-matter covered in his course; he found it necessary to systematize his knowledge and to present his facts in an orderly fashion, and he had had no previous practice in doing this


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 sort of thing. It was quite easy to see why he had failed. He was working under a new system, and he had not adjusted himself to it.

I have seldom seen a boy who was so smart in high school that he was excused from all his examinations who, without unusual effort, was able to do well in college. Such boys have a good many facts, possibly, in their possession, but when they want to use them, they don't know where they are. They have been mislaid or so jumbled up with other things that it is impossible to disentangle them. Knowledge is of little use to any one unless it is available. I have all sorts of tools about the house, but if when I want to drive a nail I discover that the hammer is gone, and I am forced to use a flat iron, of what service to me is the hammer? A boy may have innumerable items of information somewhere about his brain, but if when he finds a use for facts it is impossible for him to organize or to recall them, he is about as well off as if he did not have them at all.

The best possible use of an examination is that it necessitates an organization of knowledge. A boy must get his facts into some sort of order if he is to do his best in a limited time. He must have what he has learned laid out before his mental vision so that he can put his hands on it readily if it is called for. I am often an onlooker at surgical operations. Nothing in this sort of experience interests me more than the preparations


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 which are always made before the actual work of the operation begins. There is the movable tray standing ready by the operating table with its array of instruments all laid out in the most careful order. There are sponges, and needles, and all sorts of thread, and detractors, and forceps all in their places, and so arranged that whatever may be needed in the emergency that is likely to occur will be ready for use. It is some such preparation as this that a boy should make who is getting ready for an examination. He does not know what is going to be called for, but if he has his information in logical order he is ready for any call.

An examination, or at least the preparation which any sensible boy will make in getting ready for an examination, is an excellent training in judgment. The boy, as he goes over the material he has studied, must determine what is fundamental, what is important, and what without danger may be discarded. This requires thought, discrimination, and care. It is not so difficult to pick out each day the important facts of a lesson as it is at the close of a year's or a half year's study to select what one should carry with him from the mass of facts that has been considered. Knowing that he will be required to do this, a boy will study with a very different purpose than he would show if he were convinced that when a day's lesson is learned, he is through with it for all time.

Examinations are meant to test a student's resource-


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 fulness, his ability to meet a-new situation, to assemble facts in a different way than he had been accustomed to do, and from them to draw new conclusions.

"I never heard of some of the things the teacher asked us today," one of my neighbor boys announced following a final examination. "I'm sure a lot of the answers were not in the book."

It always seems an injustice to a boy to be asked on an examination anything the answer to which can not easily be found by turning to the book. But really the best sort of question to ask is the one that requires the searching of a boy's brain rather than the book before he finds the proper answer. Nobody in real life ever finds a problem presented just as it is in the book, but, if he has learned to analyze and to organize his knowledge, the one in the book helps him to the solution of the one in real life. The lawyer seldom if ever finds the series of circumstances surrounding his first important case like any particular illustration he has studied; the surgeon taking out his first appendix can seldom put his finger on the disturbing organ at the point where the books say it ought to be. It is the thing that isn't in the book that we are always running up against in practical life, and it is a very good experience to get used to in the examinations taken in school.

The greatest howl which is set up by the high school boys I know against examinations is caused by the so-called "catch-questions" which are frequently introduced


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 wall. “How I wish we could go through this wall—” said Willie, and just as he said this the ice seemed to open and there was a great gateway leading into the strangest garden that you ever heard of in all your life. It was a garden all of toys, and Annie and Willie could hardly believe their eyes as they saw the wonders about them. Hanging right over the wall there appeared to be something growing like morning-glories. When they looked again the children saw that they were not morning-glories at all, but small, toy talking-machines, while on a trumpet-vine nearby they saw growing, like flowers, real toy trumpets. Willie picked a trumpet at once and played on it: “Toot-toot-toot-toottoo-oo-o.”

“Oh, you must not touch the toys, Willie,” gasped poor Annie in fright. “We don’t know who owns this garden.”


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 into examinations, and by the fact that examinations are frequently sprung upon an unsuspecting and unprepared class without announcement.

"If he had only told us ahead of time that we were going to have the quiz," the boy protests, "it wouldn't have been so bad; but there we were absolutely unprepared. It wasn't fair."

Here again there is something to be said on the other side. It is the purpose of an examination just as much to discover what a boy does not know as it is to find out the facts he is acquainted with. It is very helpful to a teacher at times as well as to his students to stumble upon the weak places in his teaching and in their knowledge. The "catch question" often tests the alert mind. All through life a boy will find that there is likely to be some one lying in wait to catch him by a trick or a technicality. He might as well get used early in life to recognizing these situations and meeting them. If only the expected happened, the world would be a very much easier place in which to live than it now is. I try to figure out each morning as I go to my office what form of student irregularity I shall during the day have to adjust, but I am never successful. No two days are alike; every problem which is presented has something in it unforeseen and unlike anything else which I have ever met. If we knew when we were going to die we should be upset considerably, no doubt, but I am not at all sure that we should meet the grim destroyer with any more composure than we shall when he comes upon us


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 even willing to admit that this choice of what was to him reality out of all the appearances so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him. But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life.

I could not think clearly about it. I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty that I could think of only as a conjunction of calamitous images. I think of it happening somewhere behind


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 unannounced. It is the way most experiences of life come, so why not examinations?

The hard examination is frequently objected to on the ground that it is not a fair test of a student's knowledge. It is a good thing for every boy, however, occasionally to give his brain a stiff work out. Qur real physical and intellectual strength is tested not so much by what we can accomplish as we loaf along lazily through life, as by what we can do when we are pushed into a corner and forced to work or to think our hardest. The boys who came through the horrors of the Argonne or of Belleau Wood never suspected what they could stand until put to the test, and their changed point of view reveals the fact that they were strengthened by the test. One young boy I know got three meals out of eleven and was without sleep for three days, and I suppose he had an easy time as compared with what other boys suffered. Of course, if a "boy lies down and refuses to do his best when he comes up "against a hard mental test, the advantage to himof such an experience is nullified.

An examination is a good game, if a boy will think of it so, a game which it is possible to learn to play skilfully. He must first of all keep his head if he is going to make a good score. He should go into the game in good condition and with good spirits. I know many fellows who get ready for an examination by studying far into the night or all night, trying in a few hours to cram into their brains all sorts of miscellaneous information. They get little sleep, and they


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 go to their examination stupid and irritable and in no condition to meet either the unexpected or the difficult. One of the best preparations for a stiff examination is a good night's sleep and a cold shower on rising. An intelligent review of the ground covered every one ought to take, but he should not try to do this at one sitting at the expense of his regular hours for sleep. This review is purely a matter of judgment to determine what is essential and what is not. It is the steady, regular, daily work that gets a fellow into condition for an examination more than the feverish cramming the night before the test comes.

Next to a rested body, a calm mind and a reasonable self-confidence are most helpful in passing a good examination, and these states of mind are much more fully within a boy's personal control than we are sometimes willing to admit. Worry and fear and lack of faith in our own ability to do a task well we largely induce in ourselves, or eliminate from our minds as the case may be. Self-control is a good deal a matter of will, and the boy who is getting ready to take an examination can exercise it very much to his advantage. Whenever a player in any game allows himself to get "rattled," then his game goes to pieces.

One should go at an examination in an orderly fashion. If you will watch a good whist player you will see that he arranges his cards carefully before he leads so that he can determine easily what the strength of his hand is. He tackles first the thing that he is sure of. So a boy going into an examination should get a grasp of the whole situation


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 before he begins his solution. He should read the entire examination paper before he begins to write, and should take stock of the requirements and of his assets. He should adjust his time to the length of the task before him. I have seen a good many boys fail an examination because having met something difficult at the outset, they gave most of their available time to the solution of this problem and had no time left for the remainder of the examination which they might have found relatively simple.

The best way from my experience to "hit an examination hard" is to answer first and as rapidly as possible all the questions the answers to which seem easy or obvious. This is quite possible, since students are seldom if ever required to write their answers in any definite order. By safely and quickly disposing of a reasonable share of the examination, the boy gains confidence, he realizes that he is probably doing fairly well, and he can divide the remainder of his time between the questions that seem to him to require more thought and care. His very satisfied state of mind will help clear his brain and steady his nerves for the doing of the task that is more difficult.

During all this time he ought to be giving some attention to the order and form of his answers. A neatly written, orderly arranged examination paper, other things being equal, will draw a higher grade by several per cent than another one which may contain the same information badly put together. We are all unconsciously attracted


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 by the shop whose windows display a tasteful and orderly arrangement of wares. Any jumble annoys us even if it be a jumble of things otherwise pleasing and attractive. Arrange your answers, therefore, so that they look well. If possible put them down so that the instructor can readily grasp what you are trying to say, and will not have to waste his time and his patience in digging out your reasoning. Number or letter the subdivisions of your answers if necessary. Write legibly. I have thrown aside many an examination paper disgusted because it was almost impossible to determine the identity of the written words. Don't crowd your material; paper is of less value than your instructor's eyesight or peace of mind. The very fact that you seem trying to make what you say clear and easy of comprehension predisposes the instructor in your favor.

It sometimes pays to guess, if one is not certain of his facts. Of course, it is a weak player who is always uncertain, and a weak boy who hasn't some things definitely in mind. But on occasion it is best to take a chance, and if you are wrong to take the consequences. Even the best of us has to bluff once in a while, and just so one doesn't get the reputation for regularly doing it, no harm is likely to be done. It is better to be struck out trying to hit the ball than it is to be sent back to the bench never having swung the bat.

I have spoken of examinations as a game. I should like to have every boy feel that it is an honest game, an honor-


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 able gentleman's game, which he must play squarely, depending upon his own skill and his own knowledge to carry him through.

"But I had to pass," a boy said to me once in justification of the fact that he had been caught cribbing.

He was entirely mistaken. Nobody has to pass, and nobody should pass unless he does so honestly. The boy who gains his grades through cribbing, is little better than a common thief. There are a thousand forms and methods of getting help illegitimately in an examination, from cribbing from your neighbor's paper to bringing books and elaborately disguised "ponies" to class, but no one who cares for honesty and for his reputation will have anything to do with any of these. In truth they seldom help a great deal. I am convinced that it could be shown, if the proper investigation were made, that the cribber loses on the whole more than he gains not only in self-reliance and strength of character but in the accuracy of the information which he puts down, which would be more dependable if he relied upon his own brains. There is the greatest satisfaction always in feeling after an examination that one has done a good piece of work. There is the greatest satisfaction in being able to feel that whatever the result of the test you have done your best and that you have played a clean square game. I always feel proud of the boy who can say after he has taken a quiz.

"Well, whatever my grade is, what I handed in was entirely my own." Like Paul he can say, "I have fought


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 a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith."

One of the stock arguments against examinations is that they are not fair.

"I could have answered almost anything else in the book," the boy who has just been through an examination protests. "He asked me just the things I didn't know."

This is, of course, virtually admitting that what the teacher had considered fundamental, the boy had thought of as trivial, and tends to prove that his mind had not been especially alert during the recitation periods. It is not possible that the teacher, in making a comprehensive set of examination questions, should have selected only those details with which the student was not familiar unless the student had shown little attention to what had been going on in the class recitation. Even a poor teacher makes pretty clear during the class work some of the points at least which he considers important.

I have never doubted that there are times when an examination strikes even a good student pretty hard, just as in playing a game one is sure at times to draw a poor hand or to have a bad run of luck. But just as surely he will stumble upon the easy test when everything seems to be coming his way. Sometimes, when he has apparently made little preparation, the quiz seems as easy as taking candy away from a baby. In such a case, however, I have yet to hear the first claim that examinations do not fairly


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 measure a boy's ability. It is the average, and not the single test that truthfully measures a student's accomplishments.

I always like to hear a group of high school boys discussing grades. From such discussions, of which I have heard not a few, I would draw the conclusion that from the high school boy's point of view at least, grades do not indicate fairly a boy's accomplishment in any subject. Grades are in no sense an index of a student's real ability and do not show what he has "got out of a subject." They do not suggest anything of what he is likely to accomplish after he is through with school and college and has gone into the practical work of life. If a mistake has ever been made in a boy's grade, and such mistakes the boy admits are legion, it has always been that he has been marked lower than he deserved. I have never yet heard a boy complain that his teacher had given him a grade higher than he was entitled to. The assigning of grades, he is convinced, is very much a lottery. The teacher very likely writes the names of his students on slips of paper and puts them in one hat, and a series of grades on other slips and puts these in another hat, pulls out a name and then a grade and thus settles each boy's fate. It is a pretty generally accepted doctrine that nothing gives a teacher so much or so exquisite joy as to be able to flunk a boy. The more he flunks the more pleasure he gets out of his work.

To begin with, grades are symbols only; they should never be taken quite literally. They are meant merely to


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 indicate the difference between poor and excellent work. The raising or the lowering of the passing grade in any school would seldom if ever influence the number who would be passed or failed. For instance, in the school which I attended seventy-five was the passing grade. At a similar institution which a boy friend attended in another country, thirty was the passing grade, and yet no larger a percentage of the students were passed in his school than in mine. The only difference was that in the school with the lower passing grade it was possible to show a greater variety of ability, and the student in his institution who was given the very high grade was entitled to somewhat more distinction than was the man who got the high grade in my institution. Students argue often that because the passing grade in a school is high the standard of excellence in that school is necessarily higher than in a school where the passing grade is lower. There is little or nothing to such an argument.

To a very large degree grades are an index of the character of the work that a student is doing. A single grade either high or low can not fairly determine an individual case, for a single grade may be the result of luck, good or bad, or, perhaps, it is better to say of chance; but a boy's average grade may in general fairly be taken to represent either his ability or his industry. If his grades are uniformly high he is either a quick, clever thinker or a hard worker; if they are regularly low, he is either dull or lazy.


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 "Now, father," I heard Frank explaining to his parent when questioned as to the cause of a particularly modest showing in grades at the end of a half year, "I got a lot out of those courses which doesn't show in my grades."

He was really dodging the issue as was Adam when caught with the apple or Cain when his brother was missing.

If a boy has actually secured any logical or definite information from a course the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of his being able to make clear to the teacher that this is the case. The boy who writes a poor examination is in the same class as the teacher who presents his subject badly—ten chances to one the matter is muddled in his own brain. If you will pin such a person down to actual "brass tacks," you will find that his knowledge is not clear-cut and definite.

It is not at all difficult to find illustrations of the high school and college student whose scholastic record has been commonplace or poor who later in life has made a distinct if not a brilliant business or professional success. Neither is it impossible to find illustrations of the high school and college valedictorian whose place in middle life is commonplace and whose success was never attained. The fact, however, that such cases stand out so clearly, that they make such a vivid impression upon our minds, only tends to prove that they are rather rare. The dullard in school is not hopeless; he simply has far less chance to make good


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 than has the student who has given a good account of himself. The bright student in school and college does not have a monopoly on success; he simply has considerably more than an even chance with the other fellows to make good.

I have followed pretty carefully the record of fellows whom I knew in school and college twenty-five or thirty years ago. There are a few who did well scholastically who have done little in the positions which they have since held. In most cases, however, it is not difficult to understand why; they had alert minds without self-reliance or initiative. There are some, also, whose scholastic record was little to their credit, who are now leaders in the business or the profession which they have taken up. Here, too, the explanation is not hard to find. They had conceit and self-reliance; they were good judges of human nature, and their independence and personal magnetism outweighed their lack of ability to think and reason logically. On the whole, however, I can say that in more than ninety per cent of the cases of the fellows I have known in school and college, the success of these men could be very accurately measured by the grades which they received while they were in the high school or college. It is as sensible to claim that character is worthless, because it is possible to show that a crook occasionally gets by with his crookedness, as it is to claim that grades neither indicate a boy's success in school nor his probable progress later in life. The facts prove otherwise.