schoolmasters who, of all people, ought to know most of hygiene and physiology, are, for the most part, woefully ignorant of them. It would be indeed interesting to discover what percentage of public school house masters have read any serious medical writing. They are only too willing to believe that such habits have the disastrous results they prophesy. And of course it has not, unless it is practised to excess and unless the subject is particularly feeble. It is foolish to throw lighted matches about the place, but the habit only becomes dangerous when the matches are flung on inflammable material. It so happens that the greater part of active immorality in schools takes place between boys of fifteen and sixteen; not, as is more frequently imagined, between junior and senior boys. Such relationships are usually of brief duration. They pass with the dawn of the romantic friendship. And it is here that I feel most acutely the difficulty of my task. It is almost impossible to explain to some one who has not been to a Public School the nature of one of these romantic friendships. In a book called _Pleasure_ I published a story dealing with such a friendship. The majority of old public school boys who read it seemed to like it. But none of the men who had not been to a Public School could make head or tail of it. They told me in their reviews of it that it was absurd, mawkish, and unhealthy. It may be so. It may be that I wrote the story badly. I can only repeat that old public school boys liked it. And indeed it is a difficult thing to explain. For what is a romantic friendship but the falling in love of one boy with another. Such a relationship seems preposterous. I can only repeat that the public school system is unnatural, and that one must expect unnatural results from it. What, after all, is to be expected? A boy of seventeen is passing through a highly romantic period. His emotions are searching for a focus. He is filled with wild, impossible loyalties. He longs to surrender himself to some lost cause. He hungers for adventures. On occasions he even goes so far as to express himself in verse, an indiscretion that he will never subsequently commit. And what focus does a Public School provide for this eager emotionalism? There are the fierce contests of the football field, but they are, when all is said and done, the business of life, the cause for his existence. They are an enthusiasm he shares with three hundred others. He longs for something more intimate, more personal; he is, in fact, in love with love; he does not see a girl of his own age, of his own class, from one end of the term to the other; it is in human nature to accept the second best.