Well, there is a war in progress--in our country, in your town; a war more terrible, more revolting than any chronicled in history. The youth of America are marching toward the battleground, and the splendid column is passing your window now, to-day and every day. Perhaps you do not see the conflict yourself, for the battlefield is always just around the corner. As sure as you have a son, just so sure will he some day turn that corner. Just so sure will he some day stand on your doorstep, and feel the lure of the passing show, and just so sure will he some time be drawn into the conflict, when he will have to fight his way through as best he can. At six he is in your arms; at sixteen he will be on the firing-line; at twenty-six the ordeal will have passed and the battle will have been lost or won. Can you then look backward into the past and feel that you had warned and fortified him? I can. Whatever may be in store for my boy, he goes to meet it with more than my prayers--he has, also, a full knowledge of life’s mysteries. He shares with me a thorough understanding of the evils that may beset him. If my affectionate admonitions can help him, he has them; if my mistakes of the past serve as danger signals along his pathway, he knows of them; if my longer experience and broader knowledge of the world’s ways can save him, he shall escape the snares and pitfalls that await the heedless step of the untaught and untold young. Before he was seven I had told him whence we come. Scraps of conversation overheard on the street between his own playfellows warned me that the time had come and made my duty clear. I saw the pity of it! My boy, whom I had taught to look trustfully to me for the truth at all times and about all things; my boy hearing distorted and vulgarised bits of knowledge that should have come to him solemnly and sacredly from the parent whom he had learned to look upon as the fountainhead! This is what I told him: