without the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the
amenities of life that they can safely dispense with the conditions of
amenity? When I entered those brick boxes, I felt as if I were going
into a stable. Wood-work dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows
dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything unhomelike,
unattractive, narrow, and rickety. Think, now, of taking a boy away from
his home, from his mother and sisters, from carpets and curtains and all
the softening influences of cultivated taste, and turning him loose with
dozens of other boys into a congeries of pens like this! Who wonders
that he comes out a boor? I felt a sinking at the heart in climbing up
those narrow, uncouth staircases. We talk about education. We boast of
having the finest system in the world. Harvard is, if not the most
distinguished, certainly among the first institutions in the country;
but, in my opinion, formed in the entry of the first Harvard house I
entered, Harvard has not begun to hit the nail on the head. Education!
Do you call it education, to put a boy into a hole, and work out of him
a certain amount of mathematics, and work into him a certain number of
languages? Is a man dressed, because one arm has a spotless wristband,
unquestionable sleeve-buttons, a handsome sleeve, and a well-fitting
glove at the end, while the man is out at the other elbow, patched on
both knees, and down at the heels? Should we consider Nature a success,
if she concerned herself only with carrying nutriment to the stomach,
and left the heart and the lungs and the liver and the nerves to shift
for themselves? Yet so do we, educating boys in these dens called
colleges. We educate the mind, the memory, the intellectual faculties;
but the manners, the courtesies, the social tastes, the greater part of
what goes to make life happy and genial, not to say good, we leave out
of view. People talk about the "awkward age" of boys,--the age in which
their hands and feet trouble them, and in which they are a social burden
to themselves and their friends. But one age need be no more awkward
than another. I have seen boys that were gentlemen from the cradle to
the grave,--almost; certainly from the time they ceased to be babies
till they passed altogether out of my sight. Let boys have the
associations, the culture, the training, and the treatment of gentlemen,
and I do not believe there will be a single moment of their lives in
which