ry stopping-place en route.

International jealousies are forgotten, and even the barriers of race,
and creed, and politics, in the pleasant freemasonry of philatelic
friendships.

[Illustration:]

[Illustration:]

V.

Its Geographical Interest.

A few years ago many heads of colleges prohibited stamp collecting
amongst their boys. They found they were carrying it too far, and were
being made the easy prey of a certain class of rapacious dealers. Now
the pendulum is swinging in a more rational direction, and many
masters themselves having become enthusiastic collectors, judiciously
encourage the boys under their care to collect and study stamps as
interesting aids to their general studies. They watch over their
collecting, and protect them from wasteful buying. In some schools the
masters have given or arranged lectures on stamps and stamp
collecting, and the boys have voted such entertainments as ranking
next to a jolly holiday.

The up-to-date master, who can associate work and play, study and
entertainment, is much more likely to register successes than the
frigid dominie who will hear of nothing but a rigid attention to the
tasks of the day. In the one case the lessons are presented in their
most repellent form, in the other they are made part and parcel of
each day's pleasant round of interesting study.

The genuine success of the Kindergarten system in captivating the
little ones lies in its association of play with work. The same
principle holds good even to a much later age. The more pleasant the
task can be made, the more ready will be the obedience with which the
task will be performed. The openings for the judicious and helpful
admixture of study and entertainment are so few, that one wonders that
such a helpful form of play as stamp collecting has not become more
popular than it has in our colleges.

Take, for example, the study of geography, so important to the boys of
a great commercial nation. The boy who collects stamps will readily
separate the great colonising powers, and group and locate their
separate colonies. How many other boys, even after they have passed
through the last stage of their school life, could do this?
Little-known countries and states are too often a puzzle to the
ordinary schoolboy, which are familiar places to the stamp collecting
youth. Ask the ordinary schoolboy in which continents are such places
as Angola, Annam, Curacao, Funchal, Holkar, Ivory Coast, Liber