intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on
them at school. These four tools were necessary to his success in
life, but he never controlled any one of them.

Thus, at the outset, he was condemned to failure more or less
complete in the life awaiting him, but not more so than his
companions. Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and
given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done
more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course,
school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and
rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of
sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry
Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen
were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy
resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were
more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and
swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentary
game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat;
still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a
stray wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural
history if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could
ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant. Sport
as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850. For
horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures,
winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none
of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of
use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth
century, the source of life, and as they came out -- Thackeray,