For this purpose, the teacher must first of all understand the gang spirit. She is too apt, being herself a woman, to treat the boy as only a rougher and more troublesome sort of girl. She tends to interpret his acts as if they were those of a girl, and to forget how different in the two cases may be the inner meaning of the same overt deed. She errs, in short, by thinking of the boy in terms of her own woman’s nature, when she should be studying him objectively as the quite different sort of creature that he actually is. Take, for example, a rough-and-tumble fight. It is a rare woman who can see that as a boy sees it. She feels the brutality of the contest with something of the disgust with which she would view a case of fisticuffs between two women. She sees the dirt and blood, and she feels sympathetically the blows. What she does not feel is the “hour of glorious conflict, when the blood leaps, and the muscles rally for the mastery,” the “joy of battle,” the “seeing red,” the decent, manly pride in taking one’s punishment and “fighting it out as long as one can stand and see.” The same teacher, because she is a woman, will face with steady courage an experience more dreadful than twenty fist fights rolled into one; and yet, because she is a woman, she may fail to see how long a step some bruised and disheveled youngster has taken toward manhood. There are many acts of boyhood which, like fighting, seem brutal or depraved or absurd, until one makes out their instinctive basis, and realizes their inner meaning. Take, by way of another illustration, this case which fell under my own eye. A boy whose gang was “playing Indians” happened upon a flat piece of some dark red, hard-grained stone, and after days of labor fashioned from it a very respectable stone knife of the Neolithic period. As a tool, naturally, this stone knife was nearly worthless. As a piece of boyish handicraft, it was by no means without merit; and the maker had wrought it lovingly, with some vague instinctive feeling, I am sure, for the far-away times when a stone knife was an article of value to be handed down from father to son. The boy carried this primitive tool in his pocket along with his other treasures, and showed it proudly to his companions, who, being themselves boys, admired and understood. One day, however, he left it on his desk, and returned to search for it, just in time to see his teacher pick it up and toss it contemptuously into the waste-basket. There it remained; for the owner was too grieved and hurt to take it out again.