P. B. (looking sad): "Please, sir, Jones said to me, last night, that it was the 18th exercise we were to do." I (surprised): "But, my dear boy, you do not bring me any exercise at all." P. B. (looking good): "Please, sir, I was afraid to do the wrong one." Dear, dear child! the thought of doing wrong but once was too much for him! I shall always have it heavy on my conscience to have rewarded this boy's love of what is right by calling upon him to write out each of those exercises five times. * * * * * That thick-necked boy, whom you see there on the front row aiming at looking very good, and whom his schoolfellows are wicked and disrespectful enough to surname "Potted Angel," is sad and sour. His eyes are half open, his tongue seems to fill his mouth, and to speak, or rather to jerk out the words, he has to let it hang out. His mouth moves sideways like that of a ruminant; you would imagine he was masticating a piece of tough steak. He blushes, and never looks at you, except on the sly, with an uncomfortable grin, when your head is turned away. It seems to give him pain to swallow, and you would think he was suffering from some internal complaint. This, perhaps, can be explained. The conscience lies just over the stomach, if I am to trust boys when they say they put their hands on their conscience. Let this conscience be heavily loaded, and there you have the explanation of the grumbling ailment that disturbs the boy in the lower regions of his anatomy. To be good is all right, but you must not over-do it. This boy is beyond competition, a standing reproach, an insult to the rest of the class. You are sorry to hear, on asking him what he intends to be, that he means to be a missionary. His face alone will be worth £500 a year in the profession. Thinking that I have prepared this worthy for missionary work, I feel, when asked what I think of missionaries, like the jam-maker's little boy who is offered jam and declines, pleading: "No, thanks--we makes it." I have great respect for missionaries, but I have always strongly objected to boys who make up their minds to be missionaries before they are twelve years old. * * * * * Some good, straightforward boys are wholly destitute of humor. One of them had once to put into French the following sentence of Charles Dickens: "Mr. Squeers had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two." He said he could not put this phrase into French, because he did not know what it meant in English. "Surely, sir," he said to me, "it is not a prejudice to prefer two eyes to one." This boy was wonderfully good at facts, and his want of humor did not prevent him from coming out of Cambridge senior classic, after successfully taking his B.A. and M.A. in the University of London.