be a good fellow. So his home may be as good in its own way as any you will find: the best there is in the market on the table, all the standard books in the library, and a chamber fit for a prince. But does the boy want to hunt or fish, or go to the theatre or the opera, he must steal away to do it, and then tell a lie, perhaps, to cover his tracks; or want to go to a ball, he must feel this is about the same in his father's eyes as going to a burglary. We can make no greater blunder than to handle such boys and young men in this way. We ought to say, "This son of mine is not after my own heart at all; but he may be after the heart of an intrinsic goodness in some way I do not understand. He wants life and motion, stirring adventure, and all the sunshine there is on hand. I will give him his fling at the good as near as may be without the evil: he shall hunt and fish, and play billiards, if he will, in good company. I will get a table into the house, learn the play myself, and beat him if I can. I like the old books, he likes the new: he shall have the brightest and best they are writing. He loves the drama: he shall see the noblest and best plays, if he will, in the best company; and that may save him from what is mean and low if I throw no such safeguard about his life." I said just now there are young men who will take to evil courses, wallow in the filth, and drink the dregs of the cup of sin, no matter what you may do to save them; but

this is my conviction, that the vast majority of the bright, keen boys who go wrong, might be trained to a fair manhood if we would take note of the ingrain difference between them and their steady, sober brothers, whose life is duty, and their religion work. I cannot remember one instance within the circle of my own life, where fathers have shown this beautiful wisdom which turns back to its own youth for the sake of doing all that can be done for such boys, in which the result was a dead failure; while I do remember some sad instances in which boys of this make who have been kept down sternly, and denied every innocent amusement which was not approved by the sect, or would take time or money, breaking away into the wildest riot, spending all the time and money they could compass, and ruining themselves body and soul, for this life at any rate, when they could afford to defy the old man, and take their own way. Such youths are like the travellers we read about in the deserts, who, in their eagerness to drink, come to a mudhole from which men who have plenty of clear spring water would turn away in disgust, but in that deadly thirst they plunge up to the neck with the asses and camels, and wallow in the pit with ineffable delight. We must let these bright, keẻn natures have their way, then, so long as we know it is a good way, on wide human lines. They will work well some day if they can play well now be

tween whiles; satisfy their thirst at the spring, and they will loathe the mud-hole. Let them hunt, fish, dance, see brave sights, play strong games, hold honorable intercourse with young folks of their own clean breeding, spend half the money in teaching them to swim they may spend some day in sinking; and at twenty-five we may have a man who will be a joy to our failing years, where we might have had a broken wreck cast on a lee shore.

The Italians tell a story of a nobleman who grew sick of the world, and especially of the better half of it, and retired with his son, then an infant, to a castle in the mountains, where no girl or womaŋ was ever allowed to come; and there the child grew to be a young man. Then his father ventured down with him to a festival at which among many other wonders he saw young girls; and with wideopen eyes he whispered to his father, "What are they?""They are devils, my son," the father answered, and thought, no doubt, he had made all safe. But as they got ready to go home he said, "What is there in the fair you would like?" He had seen a lassie of the hills, with a blush on her cheek like the Alpine rose, and eyes blue as the campanella, who had shot a glance at him, and slain him; and, "O father," he said, "I should so like that devil!" The story is not true, I suppose, in fact; but it is true as earth and heaven can make it of life, and most of all this life I have in my mind

No use at all our crabbed and cranky wisdom, no use trying to turn these sweet, strong tides of life back upon themselves: as well try to arrest the rush up the Bay of Fundy. All we can do, and all we should do, is to find safe and clean channels for it, and so turn that to blessing which might else be the direst curse.

Of all things in the

And, if you say this has nothing at all to do with the moral and religious training no man can afford to neglect, I answer, once for all, we must take our boys as we find them, and make the very best we can of them; and this is the one way to begin with such boys, end how we may. world, we should be careful how we handle them in this great matter, lest we disgust and repel them at the very portals of the palace of truth and the temple of God. The way a good many fathers try to instil these high lessons into such sons is very much as if in all their food and drink they hid some bitter herb. The noblest lessons can be taught so that they become at last an intimate part of the boy's life, while all this bright breezy work goes on I have tried to set forth, as we can see in such peerless books as "Tom Brown at Rugby," the best book, probably, we can put into the hands of such a boy, or read ourselves when we want to get the bearings of the work we have to do for him. For our wisdom does not lie in wrenching the eager young soul out of all its belongings, and so

making quite another sort of man: it lies in taking the temper and quality as we find it, and bringing these out at last into all fine uses of which the religious life is still the highest and the best. Absolute truth-telling can be instilled through all the play, and the soul of honesty and honor and helpfulness in time out of a tender heart, and reverence for whatsoever things are true and lovely and of good report, and the consciousness of the presence of God in his life, who can look with a loving glance on a boy at play as surely as on a man in a prayer-meeting, and does not count such time lost as the goody good books do; and the nearness and certainty of the heavens to which the young heart will turn now and then out of all the turmoil; and the Christ who could play as a child with children, and watch the innocent games of the youth of Galilee with no sour or sad glance, though by his nature he might have no part or lot in them. Let me raise my bright boy in such a good nurture as this, and when I am getting through with it all I shall surely expect to have a man I can be proud of, who has learned at last the great lesson how to make the best of his dangerous nature, and to turn what might have been a curse into unspeakable blessing; and no human being in the world will weep more tender tears over my grave, than the lad whose wild but wholesome ways are now turning my house upside down.