The system of teaching a boy ethics and morals by lecturing him or by feeding him with tracts which hold up to view the abstract beauties of morality has long since been thrown into the discard as archaic and useless. It is one of the relics of unscientific training--Puritanical, wasteful, inefficient. The keen discernment of the boy’s mind sees the dry bones of such methods. The boy is red-blooded and alive and wants live methods. Some of our forefathers truly believed they had found the secret of boy-training in the cultivation in him of a sense of self-abasement, personal unworthiness, and insignificance which they fostered by requiring the boy to sing hymns which likened him to a poor worm groveling in the dust. I have never yet met a boy who admitted his relationship to the worm--apart from his compulsory expression of the sentiment in song. The Scout idea is to get back to elemental things by contact with the earth, the ozone of the open, the wild life of the forest and stream. These things not only make him a strong, healthy animal, but teach him the joy of living and how to live. They train the boy to “Be Prepared” for all the various contingencies of life and thus exemplify the motto of the organization. Scout camps and hikes are a school for training the imagination in the legends of the woods and of animal life, which are inspired by the mystery of the camp fire and the glorious solitude of the starry night, faintly stirred by the wind in the tree tops. The gleam of wavering lights from the camp fire transforms the faces of the circling scouts into animated sprites. Ascending flames split the darkness into dancing shadows which people the surrounding woods with living myths and fables. A kaleidoscopic riot of color mounts upward, painting luminous images on the retina as it sketches in chromatic outline the heroes of fantasy. It is such things which inspire the poetry of life. Nothing furnishes such stimulus to the imagination as the camp fire. It calls into play all the mystery and mysticism of the human mind; it discovers the hidden wellsprings of romance, legend and adventure; it inspires the art of the story-teller as nothing else can do and furnishes a perfect stage setting for the dramatic tale which unobtrusively carries its own moral. It is here that the _raconteur_ can weave his tale from the warp of adventure and the woof of romance until the resulting mantle of heroism fits every boyish auditor. Deeds of daylight loom large with valor against the background of night. The potent influence of such surroundings for driving home lasting impressions on the imaginative and sensitive mind of youth has never been equaled.