years ago boys were still such until well out of their "teens"; now
the interval between infancy and the age at which the boy becomes a
young man is so brief that boyhood is almost a thing of the past. The
happy period of care-free, joyous innocence which formerly intervened
between childhood and early manhood is now almost unobservable. Boys
grow old too fast. They learn to imitate the vices and the manners of
their seniors before they reach their teens, and are impatient to be
counted as men, no matter how great may be their deficiencies, their
unfitness for the important duties and responsibilities of life. The
consequence of this inordinate haste and impatience to be old, is
premature decay. Unfortunately the general tendency of the young
members of the rising generation is to copy the vices of their elders,
rather than the virtues of true manliness. A strong evidence of this
fact, if there were no other, is the unnaturally old-looking faces which
so many of our boys present. At the present time the average boy of
twelve knows more of vice and sin than the youth of twenty of the past
generation.

It is not so much for these human mushrooms, which may be not inaptly
compared to toadstools which grow up in a single night and almost as
speedily decay, that we write, but for the old-fashioned boys, the few
such there may be, those who have not yet learned to love sin, those
whose minds are still pure and uncontaminated. Those who have already
begun a course of vice and wickedness we have little hope of reforming;
but we are anxious to offer a few words of counsel and warning which
may possibly help to save as brands plucked from a blazing fire, those
whose moral sense is yet alive, who have quick and tender consciences,
who aspire to be truly noble and good.

What are Boys for?--This question was answered with exact truthfulness
by a little boy, who, when contemptuously accosted by a man with the
remark, "What are you good for?" replied, "Men are made of such as we."
Boys are the beginnings of men. They sustain the same relation to men
that the buds do to full-blown flowers. They are still more like the
small green apples which first appear when the blossoms drop from the
branches, compared with the ripe, luscious fruit which in autumn bends
the heavy-laden boughs almost to breaking. Often, like the young apples,
boys are green; but this is only natural, and should be considered no
disgrace to the boys. If they grow