if he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can’t be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told me all about it.”

I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, “At least promise me that you will give him this book,” placing in his hands Mr. George Everett’s excellent little book, Your Innings.  This he consented to do.  The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the boy having been already despatched by an early train.  “Well,” he said, “I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off.  But there is just one chapter in it, called a ‘Strange Companion,’ which I took the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is.”  I need not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his guard.  Oh, befooled and purblind father!  I happened to know that the school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance.  His father had handed over the ground of his boy’s heart for the devil to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as we say, but acorns—­a dread sowing which it may take years to root up and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can ever be wholly extirpated.

In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys.  It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve could have any temptations of the kind.  Unlike the father I have mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening.  She found that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield and do as the other boys did.  Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight his little forlorn hope absolutely alone.  I need scarcely say how thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, “his strength would be the strength of ten” if he kept himself pure.  She probably took steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that preparatory school, but of this I do not know.