them to live in two worlds, and to keep the inner life very sharply and securely ruled off from the outer.  They must be approached tactfully and gently as individuals.  It is possible to establish a personal and friendly relation with many boys, so long as they understand that it is a kind of secret understanding, and will not be paraded or traded upon in public.  In their inner hearts there are the germs of many high and beautiful things, which tend, unless a boy has some wise and tender older friend—­a mother, a father, a sister, even a master—­to be gradually obscured under the insistent demands of his outer life.  Boys are very diffident about these matters, and require to be encouraged and comforted about them.  The danger of public schools, with overworked masters, is that the secret life is apt to get entirely neglected, and then these germs of finer qualities get neither sunshine or rain.  Public spirit, responsibility, intellectual interests, unconventional hopes, virtuous dreams—­a boy is apt to think that to speak of such things is to incur the reproach of priggishness; but a man who can speak of them naturally and without affectation, who can show that they are his inner life too, and are not allowed to flow in a sickly manner into his outer life, who has a due and wise reserve, can have a very high and simple power for good.

But to express all this in the pages of a book is an almost impossible task; what one wants is to get the outer life briskly and sharply depicted, and to speak of the inner in hints and flashes.  Unfortunately, the man who really knows boys is apt to get so penetrated with the pathos, the unrealised momentousness, the sad shipwrecks of boy life that he is not light-hearted enough to depict the outer side of it all, and a book becomes morbid and sentimental.  Then, too, to draw a boy correctly would often be to produce a sense of contrast which would almost give a feeling of hypocrisy, because there are boys—­and not unfrequently the most interesting—­who, if fairly drawn, would appear frivolous, silly, conventional in public, even coarse, who yet might have very fine things behind, though rarely visible.  Moreover, the natural, lively, chattering boys, whom it would be a temptation to try and draw, are not really the most interesting.  They tend to develop into bores of the first water in later life.  But the boy who develops into a fine man is often ungainly, shy, awkward, silent in early life, acutely sensitive, and taking refuge in bluntness or dumbness.

The most striking instances that have come under my own experience, where a boy has really revealed the inside of his mind and spirit, are absolutely incapable of being expressed in words.  If I were to write down what boys have said to me, on critical occasions, the record would be laughed at as impossible and unnatural.