must be found.  The home has failed so that he must leave home and come under the influence of some one who understands the nature of the difficulty and can adapt the boy to school life.  A change of environment of this sort as a preliminary to the public school is often all that is needed.  If his age permits, every effort should be made in this way to obtain for the nervous child who has developed peculiarities or faults the benefits of a public-school education.

Some types of nervous children will show immediate improvement when they go to school.  The boy who is passionate and disobedient, and whose parents cannot control him, is best at school.  Boys who, from being much with grown-up people, have become too precocious and have acquired the habits and tastes of their elders, will dislike school at first, but it will do them good.  Their fault shows that they are quick to learn and sensitive to the influences of others, and they will soon adapt themselves to their new surroundings.  Boys who are dreamy and imaginative, who early adopt a “specialist” attitude towards life, who, however ignorant they may be of everything else, cultivate a reputation for omniscience in some particular subject, such as Egyptology, astronomy, or the construction of battleships, are usually nervous boys whose symptoms will disappear at school.  Where undue timidity, phobia, or habit spasm is present, the question is more difficult to decide.  Every individual case must be studied as a whole, and our object should be not unnecessarily to deprive the boy of the wholesome training of public-school life.

There are parents who from sheer ignorance add to the difficulties which the boy encounters in going to school.  Failure to appreciate very small points may cause unnecessary suffering.  To be the only boy in the school to wear combinations is not a distinction that any new boy craves, however strong his nerves may be.  A friend of mine still relates with feeling how, twenty years ago, he arrived at school with shirts which buttoned at the neck!  At night when every one else in the dormitory was asleep he sat for hours on his bed, miserable beyond words, removing the buttons and doing his best in the dark to bore buttonholes which would admit what every other boy in the school had—­a collar stud.

With girls perhaps this question of fitness for school life does not arise in so urgent a way.  Girls are usually older when they go to school, and girls’ schools are perhaps less terrifying and more like home.  There is, however, one important point which should be borne in mind.  The date of the onset of puberty varies much in both sexes.  If the boy grows to a great hulking fellow at fourteen, and even displays a desire secretly to borrow his father’s razor, he is at no particular disadvantage as compared with his fellows.  He is so much bigger and stronger than the others that he may thereby early enjoy the distinction of playing at “big side,” or