As I said above, there is something antipathetic to the young in learning from those whom they love: they would rather be controlled and taught by those for whom they have no primary affection. Besides, it must be confessed that parents have other shortcomings, all the shortcomings of varied human nature, which are perfectly patent to the uncanny acuteness of children. The father and mother whose influence during the critical years of childhood and adolescence would be nothing but good are extremely rare. Parents, for one thing, can so seldom hit the mean between taking too much interest and too little. Indifference means either undue indulgence or undue restriction; too great interest leads either to jealousy of other influences, to hampering independence, to surrounding a boy with a close atmosphere of emotion from which he would give anything to get away. Boys like to be treated calmly, to be rewarded calmly and to be punished calmly: they are unemotional creatures whom school suits well in this respect. The continued society of ideal parents may be ideal for a boy, but where parents fall short of the ideal, it is questionable whether their continued society is a good thing: and they may be sure that their lapses will be judged by their children with all the cruelty of innocence and ignorance. Holidays, to which the boys come back full of affection and pleasant anticipation, are quite long enough to give the good mother and father all the chance they need if they will only take it, to say nothing of the influence of letters. How different is the eagerness with which at a boarding school a boy looks for the letters bearing the well known handwriting of his mother to the apathy with which any home bred boy must regard the daily prospect of banalities over the family tea-table! As a matter of fact, the opportunities of the holidays are too often neglected. It is then that enthusiasm may be reinforced and new interests aroused to counteract the routine and convention which is the chief fault of our schools to-day. Too many parents think their duties are limited then to giving their children enjoyment, forgetting that theirs is the responsibility for sending their boys back to school not one whit more developed or improved than when they left its gates some weeks earlier. This very failure shows the difficulty of home education: the boarding school is organised purely for the advantage of the boys, while in the home the convenience of the parents must be competitive, even where it is not paramount. The interests of young and old cannot possibly entirely coincide, and it would be foolish for parents who, after all, have their own lives to lead and their own developments to be pursued, to sacrifice their time and their arrangements altogether for the sake of their children. To what lengths an English mother will go in this direction many a son will confess, remembering his own insensibility at the moment: but it would