never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad
language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes
when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one
syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if
he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't
be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told
me all about it."

I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole
subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to
warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his
absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least
promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr.
George Everett's excellent little book, _Your Innings_. This he
consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the
boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said,
"I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is
excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there
is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took
the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in
his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his
head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need
not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his
guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the
school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral
epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt
atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance.
His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil
to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as
we say, but acorns--a dread sowing which it may take years to root up