think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet, after all,
you have the real thing--wife, children, and home. But, in my case,
these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me already. Disguise it as
I will, I am part of the sordid furniture of life that they have so
gladly left behind, the crowded corridor, the bare-walled schoolroom,
the ink-stained desk. They are glad to think that they have not to
assemble to-morrow to listen to my prosing, to bear the blows of the
uncle's tongue, as Horace says. They like me well enough--for a
schoolmaster; I know some of them would even welcome me, with a
timorous joy, to their own homes.

I have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately in
a special way. There is a boy in my house that I have tried hard to
make friends with. He is a big, overgrown creature, with a perfectly
simple manner. He has innumerable acquaintances in the school, but only
a very few friends. He is amiable with every one, but guards his heart.
He is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of books, and, being brought
up in a cultivated home, he can talk more unaffectedly and with a more
genuine interest about books than any boy I have ever met. Well, I have
done my best, as I say, to make friends with him. I have lent him
books; I have tried to make him come and see me; I have talked my best
with him, and he has received it all with polite indifference; I can't
win his confidence, somehow. I feel that if I were only not in the
tutorial relation, it would be easy work. But perhaps I frightened him
as a little boy, perhaps I bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my
side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which I cannot break.
Sometimes I have thought it is simply a case of "crabbed age and
youth," and that I can't put myself sufficiently in line with him. I
missed seeing him last night--he was out at some school festivity, and
this morning he has gone without a word or a sign. I have made friends
a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and I suppose it is just
because I find this child so difficult to approach that I fret myself
over the failure; and all the more because I know in my heart that he
is a really congenial nature, and that we do think the same about many
things. Of course, most sensible people would not care a brass farthing
about such an episode, and would succeed where I have failed, because I
think it is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young
pe