There are some men who never grow old, who, while doing a man's part better than most in the world, keep the child-heart pure within them. Happy are the children who call them father! The ideal father (since we are writing of what we all know to be the highest in home relationship, we may call him so) will be a boy in the midst of his boys all his days; he will share the pastimes, the interests, the absorbing occupations of his boys, in the schoolroom and the recreation-ground, just as he did not disdain to join sometimes in the frolic of the nursery. He will understand cricket and football, and hounds and hares, and know all the little points of schoolboy honour, so that he may at once grasp the situation when his lad brings his grievance or his tale of victory to him. And through it all, without preaching, which the soul of the average boy abhors, he will seek to inculcate the highest moral lessons, thus accentuating and deepening the teaching of the nursery still fresh in the boy's mind. This is the ideal which we would wish to see in every home, but the real is rather different, and sometimes perplexing to deal with. We have seen homes where the boys do not "get on" with their father, who seem to rub each other the wrong way, and to have no sort of kinship with each other--in a word, who are not chums, which is a boy's definition of the jolliest possible relationship, and which is very beautiful existing between father and son. But there are fathers who have no patience with the boy who, feeling in him the promptings of a larger life, begins to give himself little airs, and to adopt a manly and masterful manner; no sympathy with his desire for freedom; and who, instead of wisely guiding all these accompaniments of young manhood into fresh and legitimate channels, seeks to curb them, to restrain every impulse, and to enforce an authority the boy does not understand, and inwardly, if not outwardly, kicks against. I know many mothers who have difficulty in pouring oil on such troubled waters, and who see that the father and the boy do not understand each other, and cannot get on--and she is powerless to help. Out of this strained relationship many evils may arise. The young heart, bounding with a thousand buoyant impulses, eager to see life and taste its every cup, deprived of sympathy and outlet, and thrown back upon itself, becomes reserved, self-contained, and morbid. Then, again, there is a temptation to concealment, and even to prevarication, over mere trifles. When censure is feared--and the young heart is fearfully sensitive--little fibs are told to escape it, and so a great moral wrong is inflicted, which can undoubtedly be laid at the unsympathetic parent's door. The mother, by reason of her gentler nature (to which, of course, there are the usual exceptions), is not so feared, and is made the go-between.