_Boy No. 5_ was perhaps the most critical case of all, yet the one most difficult to describe. He was good, and about equally good, in all his studies. He stood head in almost every class. He was so uniformly good that his character became monotonous, and would have been insipid, but for the manly vigor that marked all his performances. His moral were like his mental traits. He was indeed our model boy. In two years he had not had one demerit mark. He was on all sides rounded and complete--_totus teres atque rotundus_. The uniformity of his goodness was sometimes a source of anxiety to me. There was danger of his growing up with a self-satisfied, pharisaical spirit. Thus far, however, I have not named the feature which I regarded as the critical one, and which had led me to select him as one of the subjects for examination. Model boys are to be found in all schools. But this boy had a power of reticence which was to me a continual study, and it was this feature in his character that I wanted to bring out in the examination. He was not a sneak. There was nothing sly about him. His conduct was open and aboveboard. What he did was patent to all. But what he thought, or how he felt, no one knew. Not Grant himself could more perfectly keep his own counsel. If a new rule was promulgated, Joseph obeyed it to the letter. But whether it was agreeable or disagreeable to him, no teacher could ever find out. Nor was his obedience of that tame, passive sort which comes from indifference and lack of spirit. We all knew him to be resolute, and to be possessed of strong passions. But his power of self-restraint was equal to his power of reticence. He had, indeed, in a very marked degree, qualities which you look for only in those who have had a long schooling in the stern realities of life, and which you find rarely even then. He was as self-poised as a man of fifty, with not a particle of that easy impulsiveness so nearly universal at his age. None of the gentleman's performances surprised me so much as the character which he assigned to this boy, and all the more because something of the boy's self-continence and reserve was written upon his face and manner. He was represented by the Professor, in general terms, as having a free and easy, rollicking sort of disposition--not being really worse than his companions, though probably having the reputation of being so. 'If he got into more scrapes than the others [Joseph was never in a scrape in his life], it was more owing to his natural impulsiveness than to anything inherently bad in him. And then, when he did get into a scrape, he had no faculty for concealing it. His organ of secretiveness was unusually small. The boys would hardly admit him to a partnership in their plans of mischief, so sure was he inadvertently to let the cat out of the bag,' etc., etc.