of this Company, and you are only a shareholder. _You can spit._" Mr. H.J. Barker, who is, I believe, what Mr. Squeers called "A Educator of Youth," has lately given us some pleasant echoes from the Board School. A young moralist recorded his judgment, that it is not cruel to kill a turkey, "if only you take it into the backyard and use a sharp knife, _and the turkey is yours!_" Another dogmatized thus: "Don't teese cats, for firstly, it is wrong so to do; and 2nd, cats have clawses which is longer than people think." The following theory of the Bank Holiday would scarcely commend itself to that sound economist Sir John Lubbock:--"The Banks shut up shop, so as people can't put their money in, but has to spend it." So far the rude male: it required the genius of feminine delicacy to define a Civil War as "one in which the military are unnecessarily and punctiliously civil or polite, often raising their helmets to each other before engaging in deadly combat." The joys of childhood are a theme on which a good deal of verse has been expended. I am far from denying that they are real, but I contend that they commonly take a form which is quite inconsistent with poetry, and that the poet (like heaven) "lies about us in our infancy." "I wish every day in the year was a pot of jam," was the obviously sincere exclamation of a fat little boy whom I knew, and whom Leech would have delighted to draw. Two little London girls who had been sent by the kindness of the vicar's wife to have "a happy day in the country," narrating their experiences on their return, said, "Oh yes, mum, we _did_ 'ave a 'appy day. We saw two pigs killed and a gentleman buried." And the little boy who was asked if he thought he should like a hymn-book for his birthday present replied that "he _thought_ he should like a hymn-book, but he _knew_ he should like a squirt." A small cousin of mine, hearing his big brothers describe their experiences at a Public School, observed with unction, "If ever I have a fag of my own, I will stick pins into him." But now we are leaving childhood behind, and attaining to the riper joys of full-blooded boyhood. "O running stream of sparkling joy To be a soaring human boy!" exclaimed Mr. Chadband in a moment of inspiration. "In the strictest sense a boy," was Mr. Gladstone's expressive phrase in his controversy with Colonel Dopping. For my own part, I confess to a frank dislike of boys. I dislike them equally whether they are priggish boys, like Kenelm Chillingly, who asked his mother if she was never overpowered by a sense of her own identity; or sentimental boys, like Dibbins in _Basil the Schoolboy_, who, discussing with a friend how to spend a whole holiday, said, "Let us go to Dingley Dell and talk about Byron;" or manly boys like Tom Tulliver, of whom it is excellently said that he was the kind of boy who is commonly spoken of as being very fond of animals--that is, very fond of throwing stones at them. Whatever its type,