is a great pinching in the home in order to afford the educational advantages of school and university, it does show some radical defect in the training of our boys that they should indulge in such expensive habits, especially the expensive and wholly unnecessary habit of smoking, when the dear mother and young sisters are doing without many a little home comfort in order to meet the expense of the young rascal’s education.  One rich old grandmother whom I met abroad promised each of her grandsons fifty pounds if they would give up smoking; and it was marvellous how that stern necessity of doing as other young men do disappeared like their own tobacco smoke before the promise of that fifty pounds for their own pockets!  They were all able to claim it one after the other.  If boys were not trained by their mothers to be systematically selfish, might not the home-claims in the heart be as strong as those fifty pounds in the pocket?

Secondly, with regard to betting and gambling, which may be classed with drinking, as the fruitful parent of bad company, and a descensus ad infernum:—­do you not think a boy may be best guarded against a habit of betting, which is so likely to lead on to gambling, by taking the same line as a boy of my acquaintance took with his mother when she was warning him against it:  “Well, mother, you see, it always does seem so mean to me to get a fellow’s money from him without giving him anything in return; it always does seem so like prigging, and some of our fellows are awfully hard up, and can’t afford to lose a penny.”  Mr. Gladstone was evidently of the same opinion when he once said to his private secretary, Sir Edward Hamilton, that he “regarded gambling as nothing short of damnable.  What can be the fun of winning other people’s money?” This strikes me as a way of putting it which would appeal most forcibly to a boy; and if, in addition, we were to point out to him that, like all shady things, it has a tendency to grow and sharpen the man into a sharper and develop the blood-sucking apparatus of a leech, besides bringing wretchedness and misery on others, he might be led to resist the first beginnings of a betting habit which may lead on to gambling in after years.

And here I would say that the absolute absence of any training given to a boy in the right use and value of money, which has obtained till lately in our English schools, is surely suicidal and must lend itself to every form of abuse.  I do not know whether it is the same with you, but many of our boys know money only in the form of pocket-money, when it becomes to him a metal token mostly signifying so much “tuck”; becoming, as he grows older, more and more deleterious “tuck” in the shape of billiards, betting, etc., and ending in a general going “on tick,” which is worse still.  But in this matter we are improving.  I think most sensible parents nowadays place a small sum at their bank to the boy’s account, with a check-book, making