In boyhood, the legends that cling to ancient castles where only a shell
of stone is standing, and to the ash-trees that grow by the feudal
gateway, and supplied the wood for spear shafts--these and all the
stories of red men that haunt the moors, and of kelpies that make their
dwelling in the waters, become very real to us when standing in the dusk
by a moorland loch. If some otter or great fish breaks the water and the
stillness with a sudden splash, a boy feels a romantic thrill, a pause of
expectation, that later he will never experience. "The thoughts of a boy
are long, long thoughts," says the poet; he thinks them out by himself on
the downs, or the hills, and tells them to nobody.

If we all lived in the country, the advent of boys would not be a thing
to contemplate with secret dread. It is rather a terrible thing, a
houseful of boys in a town, or in a pretty thickly populated district.
Boys, it is true, are always a source of pleasure to the humorist and the
scientific observer of mankind. They are scarcely our fellow-creatures,
so to speak; they live in a world of their own, ruled by eccentric
traditional laws. They have their own heroes, and are much more
interested in Mr. Alan Steel or Lohmann than in persons like Mr. Arthur
Balfour, whose cricket is only middling. They have rules of conduct
which cannot be called immoral, but which are certainly relics of a very
ancient state of tribal morality. The humour of it is that the modern
boy is so grave, so self-assured, and has such abundance of aplomb. He
has acquired an air of mysterious sagacity, and occasionally seems to
smile at the petty interests with which men divert themselves. In a
suburban or city home, he can find very little that he thinks worth
doing, and then he becomes discontented and disagreeable. It is better
that he should do that, perhaps, than that he should aim at being a
dandy. The boy-dandy is an odd, and at bottom a slovenly, creature. He
is fond of varnished boots, of pink neckties, of lavender-coloured