and their brains may be well developed; but
not their hearts and souls.

They may find it to their interest to display perfect discipline in the
school-room and receive high marks and commendation from their teachers;
they may also excel in the various games and win prizes on the athletic
field; but this in no way prevents them from setting an insidious
example to a less precocious companion.

For practical purposes, the point-of-view and controlling motives of
these four boys is in fairly complete accord. They think it is very
smart to do things which are against the rules; but they think it is
very stupid to get caught. They believe in using their wits to get the
best of other people--especially older people, like parents and
teachers. They believe in practising concealment, dissimulation and
insincerity; but they are very wary of getting saddled with a downright
lie. They have the utmost contempt for a "tell-tale," and they include
in this opprobrium any boy who hasn't sense enough to keep from older
people an inkling of any sort, as to what he himself may have been up
to, as well as any others of the crowd. Nothing is half so bad as
blabbing what you know--not even the risk of getting caught in a lie.
They laugh at scruples of conscience; and they place little dependence
on mother love, or father love, or any kind of love which isn't
self-centered and decidedly material. They also have little use for
high-flown sentiment, poetry, old-fashioned prejudices and pretences of
romance; and if they do have time to read a book, they want it to be
something up-to-date and exciting--a detective story, for instance, with
a master thief and vampires. In addition to this, they have a number of
other precocious and undigested notions about a variety of things, which
they are ready to pass out confidentially, in almost any connection.

Again we repeat that it is not to be inferred that all the boys in any
school, or any great proportion of them, are necessarily of this sort.
But in almost any school, some of them are liable to be met with--more
so to-day than ever, for reasons which have been amply explained. There
is no way of telling, at school, what certain boys may be thinking and
saying and doing, when they are out of sight and hearing. If our boy,
Bob, is unfortunate enough to be thrown in close and constant contact
with that kind, it is unreasonable to imagine that he is at all to
blame. His natural effort is to try and a