If the boys begin them in the holidays be sure they will be continued after school is left, and therefore be firm on this point, although I know all too well how difficult it is to be stern and inflexible towards the boys who are only at home for the holidays, and naturally are in consequence just a wee bit spoiled by their indulgent parents. Now if a sitting-room can be given to the boys and the tutor, I advise it being furnished as prettily as may be as regards the walls, but the floor must not have a carpet, and room must be found there for the lathe, carpenter’s tools, and odds and ends so dear to the heart of the boy; and here let me beg and implore parents to aid and abet their children in any hobby they have, if they can do so reasonably and comfortably, and without undue expense; and let me also beg of them to keep and treat with scrupulous reverence any drawings, efforts of literary genius, or of mechanical genius, which their children produce and present to them; at the same time I do not advise their being exhibited to the world at large, while I should carefully explain to children, that the thing was kept, not because of its present intrinsic merits, nor because it was a distinct effort of genius, but because it was their doing, and because we should like to compare it with future efforts, in order that we may see how they have improved. Without going the lengths that ‘Misunderstood’ does (a book, by the way, which has made more prigs than any other under the sun, in my belief), I think parents often make their children miserable without in the least meaning to do so, by reason of the manner in which they refuse to interest themselves in their pursuits. It is not pleasant to partake of sticky black cakes baked in the dolls’-house pans, to sit on the cold stairs in the dark looking on at a spirited representation of a magic-lantern, the slides of which we know by heart, and we may endure agonies over the hundredth representation of the usual charade, neither may we feel profound interest in the School Magazine; but at the same time we are bound to think we do, and we ought to be more than thankful that our children care for these things and go in for them, rather than for the usual hanging about, reading those dreadful Rider Haggard books, which have done more harm than anything else, I verily believe, to the youth of the present day, and have vitiated their tastes, until nothing pleases them which is not written in gore and bound up in a mixture of pistols and swords, which is as odious as it is unnecessary.