CHAPTER I. IN regarding the lives of boys it is hard to say whether the bigger break comes when the boys, as little lads, leave home for a preparatory school, or when, as boys just verging into young manhood, they leave a preparatory school for a public school. As one whose life has been spent in great part among boys in their preparatory school life, I have already written a book in which reaching hands backwards I have tried to pull home life and school life together, trying to make parents see the necessity of coming themselves, so to speak, on to the arena of school, and there, with the schoolmaster, continuing their help and support to their boys, working with the masters and with the school in the further development of their sons' lives. I have tried to show how this can only be done by parents eliminating from their minds all jealousy of the new life to which their boys are going, and by schoolmasters eliminating from their minds all tendency to contempt for what they may be pleased to consider weaknesses in a parent's way of regarding his boys' development. In writing as I did then I was making an appeal to fathers and mothers not to lose their hold on their boys' lives when they send them to school. I wanted to make my point that parents ought not so much to feel that they are "sending a boy to school," sending him into a new atmosphere, to be under new influences, as that they are calling in a powerful auxiliary to aid in carrying on their boy so many steps in the path of life in which his home has started him, and of which his home has already taught him the beauties to be courted and the dangers to be reckoned with. There must be change at every step we take whether as boys or men, there must be new things to be learnt, new experiences to be bought. But an absolute break there need never be if love takes the place in our lives that it should take; takes such a place |