p from the station, for he insisted on
walking. He refused testily, and no doubt thought me, as in fact I was,
a very spiritless young man.

I remember, too, another incident of the same kind, happening about the
same time. I was invited by a fellow-undergraduate to come to tea in his
rooms, and to meet his people. After tea, in the lightness of his heart,
my friend performed some singular antics, such as standing on his head
like a clown, and falling over the back of his sofa, alighting on his
feet. I, who would not have executed such gambols for the world in the
presence of the fairer sex, but anxious in an elderly way to express my
sympathy with the performer, said, with what was meant to be a polite
admiration: "I can't think how you do that!" Upon which a shrewd
and trenchant maiden-aunt who was present, and was delighting in the
exuberance of her nephew, said to me briskly, "Mr. Benson, have you
never been young?" I should be ashamed to say how often since I have
arranged a neat repartee to that annoying question. At the same time
I think that the behaviour both of the don and the aunt was distinctly
unjust and unadvisable. I am sure that the one way to train young people
out of the miseries of shyness is for older people never to snub them
in public, or make them appear in the light of a fool. Such snubs fall
plentifully and naturally from contemporaries. An elder person is quite
within his rights in inflicting a grave and serious remonstrance in
private. I do not believe that young people ever resent that, if at the
same time they are allowed to defend themselves and state their case.
But a merciless elder who inflicts a public mortification is terribly
unassailable and impregnable. For the shy person, who is desperately
anxious to bear a sympathetic part, is quite incapable of retort; and
that is why such assaults are unpardonable, because they are the merest
bullying.

The nicest people that I have known in life have been the people
of kindly and sensible natures, who have been thoroughly spoilt as
children, encouraged to talk, led to expect not only toleration, but
active kindness and sympathy from all. The worst of it is that such
kindness is generally reserved for pretty and engaging children, and it
is the awkward, unpleasing, ungainly child who gets the slaps in public.
But, as in Tennyson-Turner's pretty poem of "Letty's Globe," a child's
hand should be "welcome at all frontiers." Only deliberate rudene