What benefit can children be but charges and disobedience? What’s the love they render at one and twenty years? I pray die, father: when they are young, they are like bells rung backwards, nothing but noise and giddiness. And from what a different vision-vantage were penned these lines, overflowing with love and understanding of childhood, which are a model of sympathetic comprehension of the child’s needs: Delightful task! to rear the tender thought, To teach the young idea how to shoot, To pour fresh instruction o’er the mind, To breathe the enlivening spirit and to fix The generous purpose in the glowing breast! --Thomson’s SEASONS. To understand the boy’s viewpoint we must be able to put ourselves in his place. We must renew our youth. The trouble with so many of us is that we never acquire juvenescence until second-childhood. We should be able to assign the boy to the psychological period to which he belongs by reason of his development, and thus knowing the mental and moral status of an inhabitant of that period, we are able to see things through his glasses. The mental myopia and moral astigmatism of youth will then be recognized as a defect of immaturity which training and years will cure. Juvenility may be reacquired in maturity if we string-halted adults would only seek rejuvenation at the fountain of youthful understanding where we may obtain a flood of knowledge concerning boy-life. The journey is apparently too long and too difficult for the lazy or indifferent grown-up. The heart of a boy is not worn on his sleeve. He reveals it only to those who command his perfect confidence and such confidence is given to those, and to those only, who understand him. The aloofness of children toward certain adults is because they have nothing in common. Each misunderstands the other. As it is obviously impossible for the child to understand and attune himself to adult mental processes, it becomes necessary for the adult to comprehend child-nature and to put himself in harmony with it.