Now, when a schoolmaster ventures to offer advice about the holidays, he might seem to be stepping presumptuously outside his own province; but that plea for reticence is one we cannot admit. Term and holidays alike are an education, and they interact upon one another so closely that the schoolmaster not only may, but must, form his judgment upon both. It is not for us to compile a detailed "Parent's Assistant." Heaven forbid! Every home has its own problems and its own opportunities, but surely there is no home in which the parents have not a range of activities, professional, commercial, political, or literary. So often, as it seems, from various motives, good and bad, the boy remains more or less excluded from these long after he has become capable of a certain partnership in his parents' interests. The drawback of life at a public school is that it is highly artificial. Call it as you please a barrack or a monastery, a boarding-school is something cut off from the main streams of ordinary life. In the holidays the boy renews contact with ordinary life, and that periodic renewal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays should bring him into contact with some more of life than its superficial frivolities. The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as fascinating as the child of two, and the parents' time and energy devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent.