must come at last, however long we may delay
it, and after Julian's thirteenth birthday it was decided that he must
go to school. In making this determination, his father knew what he was
about. He knew that in sending his son among a multitude of boys he was
exposing him to a world of temptation, and placing him amid many
dangers. Yet he never hesitated about it, and when his wife spoke with
trembling anxiety of the things which she had heard and read about
school-life, he calmly replied that without danger there can be no
courage, and without temptation no real virtue or tried strength.

"Poor Julian," said Mrs Home, "but won't he be bullied dreadfully?"

"No, dear; the days of those atrocities about which you read in books
are gone by for ever. At no respectable school, except under very rare
and peculiar circumstances, are boys exposed to any worse difficulties
in the way of cruelty than they can very easily prevent or overcome."

"But then those dreadful moral temptations," pleaded the mother.

"They are very serious, love. But is it not better that our boy should
learn, by their means, (as thousands do), to substitute the manliness of
self-restraint for the innocence of ignorance--even on the very false
supposition that such an innocence can be preserved? And remember that
he does not escape these temptations by avoiding them; from the little I
have seen, it is my sincere conviction that for after-life, (even in
this aspect alone, without alluding to the innumerable other arguments
which _must_ be considered), the education of a public school is a far
sounder preparation than the shelter of home. I cannot persuade our
neighbour Mrs Hazlet of this, but I should tremble to bring up Julian
with no wider experience than she allows to her boy."

So Julian went to Harton, and, after a time, thoroughly enjoyed his life
there, and was unharmed by the trials which must come to every
schoolboy; so that when he came back for his first holidays, the mother
saw with joy and pride that her jewel was not flawed, and remained
undimmed in lustre. Who knows how much had been contributed to that
glad result by the daily and nightly prayer which ever ascended for him
from his parents' lips, "Lead him not into temptation, but deliver him
from evil."

For when he first went to school, Julian was all the more dangerously
circumstanced, from the fact that he was an attractive and engaging boy.
With his bright eyes, beaming