The advocates of 'home influence' must also remember that the day boy takes his home for granted. We cannot appreciate the value of anything till we have either lost it, or become separated from it. Home means a great deal to the boarder. Holidays mark for him a complete change of life, to the day boy holidays mean little save the pleasurable cessation of certain irksome duties. He can stay in bed longer in the morning, he has not got to hurry his breakfast, a free day lies in front of him. He will not have to waste his time over Latin Prose and Thucydides. During the term-time he has, except during week-ends, very few opportunities of intimate conversation with his parents, and because he has come to regard their presence as a natural environment he does not, during the holidays, make, as the boarder does, special efforts to see as much of them as possible. The influence of a place need be no more effective because one happens to live in it than the influence of a person because one happens to be in his, or her, company. It depends on the value set on the place or person. The boarder values his home more highly than the day boy. The influence of home is more likely to be felt by him than by the day boy. Letters from home are an event in the boarder's life. They mean more than a walk on Sunday morning, and the hours are counted to the half-term visit. The day boy also comes far less into contact with masters than the boarder does. Indeed the head master of a school can only have a superficial knowledge of the boys that are entrusted to him. He sees them in the form room and on the cricket field. But he does not watch the development of the boy's character through his reactions towards and away from the intrigues, romances, and jealousies of house politics. There is no constant theme, only a few uncertain _motifs_. The head master has not sufficient material upon which to work. The discovery of so many clues is denied to him. Every boy at some time or other must pause and wonder how much his head master really knows about him. It is a subject, for most of us, of disquieting conjecture. But the day boy can dismiss it with an easy conscience. School for him is a place in which he works and plays, but does not live. Indeed he is a child of no man's land, passing between two countries, a true citizen of neither. There are those who say that parents are the only people who understand their children, and will maintain that it is criminal to take young boys away from their parents at an impressionable age and place them in charge of schoolmasters who can know nothing about them. But parents are, as a matter of fact, as likely to make mistakes as any one else.