to acclimatise themselves; the strangeness
will begin to wear off; and having borne up bravely against their
first sense of loneliness in the midst of a crowd they will gradually
become parts of the machine to the making of which many gentle and
sympathising hands for years past have contributed.

"Schools are not what they were," says one of my friends. "There is
no bullying nowadays and little roughness of any kind. Masters are
not looked upon as the natural enemies of boys. Corporal punishment,
except for the gravest offences, is abolished. Whereas, formerly,
little boys were at once sucked into the vortex of a Public School,
there are now Preparatory Schools, where Tommie and Dickie and Harry,
aged from nine to ten, learn the business of Public Schooling in
a manner suited to their age and capacity. When we were boys," he
continues, "these admirable buffer states were so few that they might
almost be said not to exist at all; they now flourish everywhere. The
path of the little boy is thus made easier for him."

"But," I said, "is a little boy, then, never brought to a sense of
his unimportance by being physically, if not morally, kicked? Is he to
pass his life in a condition of Sybaritic softness?"

"You need not," he said, "worry about that. Softness makes no appeal
to the average English boy."

When therefore, on a day in last week, it happened to me to take a
little boy I happen to know to his Preparatory School on his first day
of his first term there, I did so with no undue depression. "Be a good
boy," I said to him; "never tell a lie, never push yourself forward,
and don't swank about yourself." It was good advice so far as it went,
but it did not make any great impression on him, for he only answered,
"Of course," or "Of course I shan't," to every item that I put before
him. I wonder how many fathers have recently inculcated these and
similar high-toned principles on their little boys, only to meet with
the same uninterested acquiescence. And even our parting was not so
dejected as it might have been, for by that time another new boy had
come upon the scene, and he and mine had been irresistibly drawn to
one another, and were chatting gaily when it was time for me to go.

* * * * *

[Illustration: THE CELEBRITY.

THIS IS BILLY SMIFF, 'IM WOT REMEMBERS THE TIME WHEN THERE WASN'T NO
WAR.]

* * * * *

CHILDREN'S TALES FOR GROWN-UPS.

IX.