wal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays
should bring him into contact with some more of life than its
superficial frivolities.

The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time
and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time
and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen
years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any
amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development
of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of
seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as
fascinating as the child of two, and the parents' time and energy
devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent.

And it will, we believe, bring a new happiness to many parents
themselves. As school-masters, our widest experience of parents--not
that we pretend it is very wide--is our experience of boys' talk about
their homes. Boys speak of their parents with deep affection and
respect, as a rule; but so very often they leave an impression that
they do not really know them. It is the commonest thing in the world
for fathers and sons, without any positive estrangement, to get
entirely out of touch with one another during the latter part of a
boy's school-time. The boy develops rapidly, and the greater part of
his development is quite concealed from the father. He returns home to
find his father "just the same," and apparently quite unable to divine
the new developments which the son is too proud to reveal uninvited.
Or maybe he does attempt to reveal them, and, bungling his task, finds
himself misunderstood, and lays the blame on the father. So often, as
it seems, the father might have helped matters by playing a rather more
active part, and going half, or even three-quarters, of the way to meet
his son's confidences. But there is a natural shyness of fathers
towards their sons at this stage, and shyness on one side begets
shyness and misunderstanding on the other. More than once a boy has
said to one of us, "What am I to do to get into touch with my father?
Last holidays we found we'd nothing sensible to talk to each other
about at all." It is difficult to advise, but the most obvious thing
to say is, presumably, to remind the boy that his father is but a human
being like himself; that possibly the boy is himself rather
unnecessarily enigmatic, and that instead of expecting the