glove at the end, while the man is out at the other elbow, patched on both knees, and down at the heels?  Should we consider Nature a success, if she concerned herself only with carrying nutriment to the stomach, and left the heart and the lungs and the liver and the nerves to shift for themselves?  Yet so do we, educating boys in these dens called colleges.  We educate the mind, the memory, the intellectual faculties; but the manners, the courtesies, the social tastes, the greater part of what goes to make life happy and genial, not to say good, we leave out of view.  People talk about the “awkward age” of boys,—­the age in which their hands and feet trouble them, and in which they are a social burden to themselves and their friends.  But one age need be no more awkward than another.  I have seen boys that were gentlemen from the cradle to the grave,—­almost; certainly from the time they ceased to be babies till they passed altogether out of my sight.  Let boys have the associations, the culture, the training, and the treatment of gentlemen, and I do not believe there will be a single moment of their lives in which they will be clowns.

And among the first necessities are the surroundings of a gentleman.  When a man is grown up, he can live in a sty and not be a pig; but turn a horde of boys in, and when they come out they will root out.  A man is strong and stiff.  His inward, inherent power, toughened by exposure and fortified by knowledge, overmasters opposing circumstances.  He can neglect the prickles and assume the rose of his position.  He stands scornfully erect amid the grovelling influences that would pull him down.  It may perhaps be, also, that here and there a boy, with a strong native predilection to refinement, shall be eclectic, and, with the water-lily’s instinct, select from coarse contiguities only that which will nourish a delicate soul.  But human nature in its infancy is usually a very susceptible material.  It grows as it is trained.  It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely.  Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave.  Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish.  I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies.  I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs.  The effeminacy of a false aristocracy is no nearer the heights of true manhood than the clumsiness of the clod, but I think it is just as near.  I would have college rooms, college entrances, and all college domains cleanly and attractive.  I would, in the first place, have every rough board planed, and painted in soft and cheerful tints.  I would have the walls pleasantly colored, or covered with delicate, or bright, or warm-hued paper.  The floor should be either tiled, or hidden under carpets, durable,