nly in a close approximation to the standard pattern; bad form, in
any deviation from it. It is this similarity of type and community of
ideals which makes it so easy for most public-school boys to get on
well with one another. When in after life they are thrown among a set
of men who know nothing of their conception of good form, and whose
training has been on completely different lines, there may be a
corresponding difficulty.

Now what is true of public-school life is of course also true of the
larger life after schooldays are over for which all education is a
preparation. These qualities of sociability and good sportsmanship
will stand a man in good stead throughout life. Even the most ardent
and active spirit will benefit by being subjected for some years to
this steady pressure of public opinion. The most part will learn from
it good sense, consideration for others, and self-control. As they
pass from the lower forms to the higher in the school they will learn
too to support authority without doing injustice, and to bring the
weight of public opinion to bear upon others. And to all this
training many a man owes his happiness in after life--a happiness
which he could not have secured if his character had been moulded only
by the environment of his home, or by the home in combination with the
less-powerful corrective of a day school. For the nervous child the
passage from home to school life may involve considerable mental
strain. He may be morbidly self-conscious and timid, or, unknown to
himself--because he has as yet no power of self-analysis and has no
opportunities of comparing himself with others--he may have developed
certain eccentricities. In most cases the plunge into school life will
be taken well enough; in a few the little vessel will not right
itself, and proves permanently unseaworthy. No doubt as a rule a
private school will have preceded the public school, and this
gradation should make the entrance to the public school a lesser
ordeal. But it often happens that it is just in the case of the
nervous child that this intermediate stage has been omitted, and that
his thirteenth birthday finds him still in the home circle.

If the boy's father has first-hand knowledge of life in the lower
forms of public schools, his experience may enable him to form some
estimate of the effect of school life upon the nervous system of his
son. It is when parents or guardians have no such experience of their
own to gu