Probably, however, the most obvious and the most annoying aspect of the _Wanderlust_ is truancy. It takes a shrewd teacher who knows boys, backed by a good home, to hold a boy in the schoolroom in the warm days of spring when the baseball fever is at its height. Most boys become thoroughly tired of the inactivity, restraint and monotony of the schoolroom; while the matter is by no means simplified by the fact that the teacher herself commonly belongs to the sex to which certain aspects of boy nature must be forever a closed book. Granted that truancy is not to be tolerated, we must never, in dealing with any actual truant, lose sight of the fact that truancy is not a sin. It arises from two coöperating forces,--the lack of adaptation of the schools to the needs of growing boys, and the determination of the boys to be true to their own nature. For one of these factors we elders are responsible; the boy is responsible for neither. This is the day of athletics. The adult world has learned thoroughly the lesson that there can be no perfect physical development without the training which comes from the competitive and group games. Hardly less important, of late years, has been the emphasis of those who know boys best on the social and moral aspects of athletic training. The best boys’ schools to-day provide for outdoor and indoor sports as carefully as for any other branch of education. This lesson, I say, we have at last pretty well learned. We have not yet discovered, however, that the native impulses which lead a boy to baseball and hockey are only part of his equipment of gang instincts. The desire for athletic exercise which, at least for the favored few, is now being gratified at so great an expense, is no older and no more deep-seated than the desire for these activities which we have called, for lack of a better name, tribal and migratory. The boy needs diamond and gymnasium and running track. But quite as much he needs mountain and lake and river and forests. He takes a step toward manhood when he stands by his fellows through a hard-fought match. He also takes a step toward manhood when he sleeps alone under the stars. In one respect, moreover, the boy who plays ball is at no small disadvantage in after life as compared with the boy who plays Indian. The athlete will play his favorite game while he is at school. He will get a thorough and wholesome physical training, and possibly some not especially wholesome notoriety. If his parents can afford to keep him four years in college, he plays there. Afterwards, unless he is especially fortunate, he does not play at all; and all his carefully acquired skill goes for nothing.