"Take to boating. I know you could be in the first boat if you liked; I heard them say so at Smith's wine the other night." "But what's to prevent my getting just as tired of that? Besides, it's such a grind. And then there's the bore of changing all one's habits." "Yes, but it's such splendid hard work," said Tom, who was bent on making a convert of his friend. "Just so; and that's just what I don't want; the 'books and work and healthful play' line don't suit my complaint. No, as my uncle says, 'a young fellow must sow his wild oats,' and Oxford seems a place especially set apart by Providence for that operation." In all the wild range of accepted British maxims there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than this one, as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make nothing but a devil's maxim of it. What a man--be he young, old, or middle-aged--sows, _that_, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only thing to do with wild oats, is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long tough roots like couch grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves, as sure as there is a sun in heaven--a crop which it turns one's heart cold to think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else, will have to reap them; and no common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down deep again and again. Well for you if with all your care you can make the ground sweet again by your dying day. "Boys will be boys" is not much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats, is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age--with ambition, over-reaching the false weights, hardness, suspicion, avarice--if the wild oats of youth are to be sown, and not burnt? What possible distinction can be drawn between them? If we may sow the one, why not the other?