This morning one of his guardians writes to me about him.  He is a country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my pupil.  He is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position that saves him from the plainest retorts.  He writes to say that he is much exercised about his ward’s progress.  The boy, he says, is fanciful and delicate, and has much too good an opinion of himself.  That is true; and he goes on to lay down the law as to what he “needs.”  He must be thrown into the society of active and vigorous boys; he must play games; he must go to the gymnasium.  And then he must learn self-reliance; he must not be waited upon; he must be taught that it is his business to be considerate of others; he must learn to be obliging, and to look after other people.  He goes on to say that all he wants is the influence of a strong and sensible man (that is a cut at me), and he will be obliged if I will kindly attend to the matter.

Well, what does he want me to do?  Does he expect me to run races with the boy?  To introduce him to the captain of the eleven?  To have him thrust into teams of cricket and football from which his incapacity for all games naturally excludes him?  When our bumble-bee friend was at school himself—­and a horrid boy he must have been—­what would he have said if a master had told him to put a big, clumsy, and incapable boy into a house cricket eleven in order to bring him out?

Then as to teaching him to be considerate, the mischief is all done in the holidays; the boy is not waited on here, and he has plenty of vigorous discipline in the kind of barrack life the boys lead.  Does he expect me to march into the boy’s home, and request that the boy may black his own boots and carry up the coals!

The truth is that the man has no real policy; he sees the boy’s deficiencies, and liberates his mind by requesting me, as if I were a kind of tradesman, to see that they are corrected.

Of course the temptation is to write the man an acrimonious letter, and to point out the idiotic character of his suggestions.  But that is worse than useless.

What I have done is to write and say that I have received his kind and sensible letter, that he has laid his finger on the exact difficulties, and that naturally I am anxious to put them straight.  I then added that his own recollection of his school-days will show that one cannot help a boy in athletic or social matters beyond a certain point, that one can only see that a boy has a fair chance, and is not overlooked, but that other boys would not tolerate (and I know that he does not mean to suggest this) that a boy should be included in a team for which he is unfit, simply in order that his social life should be encouraged.  I then point out that as to discipline there is no lack of it here; and that it is only at home that he is spoilt; and that I hope he will use his influence, in a region where I cannot do more than make suggestions, to minimise the evil.