things.

Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked
boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that
blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues
that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house
will soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears. Being
young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered
little beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away
from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity
full-grown and with developed teeth, just consider how fearfully
sick and thrashed he would be! Apply that motion to the "sheltered
life," and see how it works. It does not sound pretty, but it is
the better of two evils.

There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the "sheltered
life" theory; and the theory killed him dead. He stayed with his
people all his days, from the hour he was born till the hour he
went into Sandhurst nearly at the top of the list. He was
beautifully taught in all that wins marks by a private tutor, and
carried the extra weight of "never having given his parents an
hour's anxiety in his life." What he learnt at Sandhurst beyond
the regular routine is of no great consequence. He looked about
him, and he found soap and blacking, so to speak, very good. He
ate a little, and came out of Sandhurst not so high as he went in.
Them there was an interval and a scene with his people, who
expected much from him. Next a year of living "unspotted from the
world" in a third-rate depot battalion where all the juniors were
children, and all the seniors old women; and lastly he came out to
India, where he was cut off from the support of his parents, and