If you are an Episcopalian, you will of course find the time of your boy’s confirmation simply invaluable as one of those turning-points which will enable you to speak, or possibly write, more unreservedly than is possible on more ordinary occasions.  I would earnestly ask you to give him a little White Cross confirmation paper called Purity the Guard of Manhood, a paper which an Eton master pronounced the best thing he had met with of the kind, and which has been widely used.  Do not rest content with merely giving the paper in a perfunctory way, but follow it up with a few living, earnest words of your own.

Of course I should do a wrong to your womanly instincts if I were to think it necessary to say that the inculcation of purity must be always in a mother’s heart, but only on her lips on some marked occasions, such as the first going to school, the last day of the holidays, or when your boy himself gives the occasion by some question he may ask you, but above all when he reaches a critical age, when a few words from your own lips will be worth all the printed pages in the world.  Only ever and always make it an essential element of his idea of manliness to be pure, and do not forget constantly to couple the words “brave and pure,” or “manly and pure,” or “pure and high character,” in his hearing; that he may be endued, not with that pale, emasculate thing that passes muster for purity nowadays, which always seems to me chiefly conscious of its own indecency, full of the old nervous “touch not, taste not, handle not” spirit, bandaged up with this restriction and that lest it fall to pieces, and when it comes to saving another from defilement in body and soul shuffling uneasily into a pair of lavender kid-gloves and muttering something about its being “such a very delicate subject”—­nay, not this, but that militant sun-clad power which Milton dreamed of, rushing down like a sword of God to smite everything low, and base and impure; a purity as of mountain water or living fire, whose very nature it is, not only to be pure itself, but to destroy impurity in others.

V

And now let me throw together two or three practical suggestions, which will probably be superfluous to the most experienced mothers, but may be useful to younger and more inexperienced parents.

In the first place, I think there are few of the heads of the medical profession who would not agree with me that our English dietary is too stimulating and too abundant.  Sir Andrew Clark certainly held that a large proportion of our diseases spring from over-eating and over-drinking.  I don’t suppose that for a boy it so much matters, as he is eating for “edification” as well as for sustenance, for the building up of his walls as well as for the nutrition of his existing frame.  But “the boy is father to the man,” and I would ask you not to accustom your boys to a rich dietary, as the habit once formed will be prolonged into early