But even mother begins to tire of acting as a buffer between her sons and her husband and the other members of the family. And by the time cook has given warning--heedless that she is the only woman who can cook the dinner to suit the master--because Reggie will melt lead in her spoons or playfully drop gunpowder in the fire, or because some pounds of butter mysteriously disappeared and followers were hinted at--though the state of her saucepans and George’s trouser pockets pointed out that toffee, not the policeman, was at the bottom of the loss--Materfamilias finds herself wondering how Dr. Swishey manages to look so well at the end of the term, and begins to think that perhaps after all she will not be quite as sorry as usual when the cab comes round and the boys go off, leaving her free to go out to dinner without dreading to see flames issuing out of the drawing-room windows when the carriage turns the corner of the Square on her return home, or fearing a summons from the festive board to bid her go back at once because one or other of the boys has done something dreadful either to himself or some other member of the family. Now, granted that this is not an isolated case--and, judging from a large personal experience of ‘other folks’ children,’ I venture boldly to state that this is the rule and not the exception--I as boldly remark that the present manner of dealing with the _genus homo_ as expressed in the schoolboy is entirely a wrong one, and, waxing bolder yet, I say that the grown-up youth evolved from such an education as most lads obtain nowadays is so emphatically unsatisfactory that I am quite sure some radical change should be made in the way we bring up our boys. Born into a home where their sisters are sheltered and cared for until they leave it for one of their own, from their very birth they are treated in an entirely different manner. As little mites they govern the house, because they are of the superior sex, and they are finally sent away from home into the great world of school, where, neither by age nor experience, can they be in the least fitted for the warfare, or enabled by careful and judicious training to hold their own, or to choose between the good and evil that is so freely offered them there. Small boys are herded with big ones, who alternately bully and confide in them; tender and sentimental fancies are derided; and the word ‘manly’ is made to express ferocity, cruelty, uncleanness, and a thousand and one awful things that, when we discover our children are aware of, we wonder feebly when and how they have acquired their knowledge.