won’t damage themselves a bit the less for fussing and fretting over them, and they will lose ever so much independence and go.  Then I teach them to shoot, and they are very fair shots with a pea-gun.  And we also do a little carpentering, so we are well employed.  They aren’t showy performers at any game, but, as they won’t be at school, that makes very little difference to them; it is handiness in general sports that is valuable afterward.

“You would think that this was a tremendous programme, but it is not; it is mostly reading and talking, with a certain amount of writing.  They have to analyse a chapter of a book of some kind every day; sometimes history, sometimes philosophy.  We do both history and philosophy as much as possible by means of biographies.  Lewes’s book is an excellent text-book, and not a bit too advanced if you will talk it over with them carefully; clever boys are never really puzzled by meanings of words.  In history we get the greatest man we can find in a period, and work out his view of all current events; and they have to write dialogues in character, and enjoy it immensely too.  I don’t press them to read for themselves very much, and I don’t make ordinary English literature their task-books, because one always may be boring a boy, and I don’t want to run the risk of boring them with things that I want them to enjoy as much as I did.

“I read to them for an hour or so every evening—­novels, plays, anything that they seem to like.  They are at liberty to choose.

“I don’t know that they would ‘go down’ at present—­certainly not among their compeers.  They talk quite naturally and straightforwardly about all kinds of topics of general interest, and they are tremendously keen about their games, but I think some people might call them prigs.  However, I keep them in a constant and wholesome contempt of their own abilities, and never let them despise or criticize anyone unfavourably; not by ‘rebuking’ it, but by indicating a point of view—­and one can always find one—­in which the person under fire is infinitely their superior.

“And they are as affectionate as they can be—­they like one another and me; and they aren’t easily disturbed by circumstances, not having had their morbid sensibilities developed, their innocent perceptions dimmed by alcoholic or other dissipations.”

I select, rather at random, one or two other passages from his letters at this time.

“I have just been reading Emerson’s Essays.  They certainly kindle one’s belief in the greatness of life and the nobility of little things; but, after all, the great refreshment of such books to me is—­not that they give me new working ideas; I hardly know a book that has ever done that; the stock of ideas is almost constant in the world; but because they show that others are on the same track of admiration and hope as one’s self for a goal only hinted at and conjectured to be glorious—­on the same track, and farther advanced upon it; like older people, they fill in with experience what one has only guessed at.  I find myself saying, ’I expect that life will be like this and that:  it will confirm this and that idea in startling ways:’  and then one of these great souls comes softly to me, and says, ‘It is true.’”