dance, may be clever and funny to read about; but his cleverness and "funniness" are not many degrees removed from those of the forger and the impostor, who may also be amusing in fiction.

Another bad thing in the substitution of excuses, even fairly honest excuses, for work is the weakening effect of it on everyday life. The work of the world is in large measure done by people whose heads and throats and stomachs do not feel just right, but who go about their daily duties, and in doing them forget their heads and throats and stomachs. He who is to be "there" as a man cannot afford to cosset himself as a boy. A well-known railroad man has remarked that he knows in his business two kinds of men: one, with a given piece of work to do before a given time, comes back at the appointed hour and says, “That job is done. I found unexpected difficulties, but it is done;" the other comes back

with "several excellent reasons" why the job is not done. "I have," says the railroad man, "no use for the second of these men." Nor has any business man use for him. The world is pretty cold toward chronic invalids and excusemongers. "If you are too sick to be here regularly," it says, "I am sorry for you, but I shall have to employ a healthier man." You will find, by the way, that it is easier to attend all your recitations than to attend half or threequarters of them. Once open the question of not going, and you see "several excellent reasons" for staying at home. Routine, as all mature men know, steadies nerves, and, when used intelligently, adds contentment to life.

I have spoken of lying to college officers, and of excuses which, if I may use an undergraduate expression, "may be right, but are not stylish right." I come next to the question of responsibility to father and mother in matters of truth and

falsehood. One of the evils from vice of all sorts at college is the lying that results from it. Shame and fear, half disguised as a desire not to worry parents, cut off many a father and mother from knowing what they have a right to know, and what they, if confided in, might remedy. I have seldom seen a student in serious trouble who did not say-honestly enough, I presume-that he cared less for his own mortification than for his father's and mother's. As a rule, one of his parents is threatened with nervous prostration, or oppressed with business cares, or has a weak heart which, as the son argues, makes the receipt of bad news dangerous. Filial affection, which has been so dormant as to let the student do those things which would distress his parents most, awakes instantly at the thought that the parents must learn what he has done. The two severest rebukes of a certain gentle mother were: "You ought to have meant

not to," and "You ought to have been sorry beforehand."

Many a student, knowing that the college must communicate with his father, will not nerve himself to the duty and the filial kindness of telling his father first. I remember a boy who was to be suspended for drunkenness, and who was urged to break the news to his father before the official letter went.

"You don't know my father," he said. "My father is a very severe man, and I can't tell him."

"The only thing you can do for him," was the answer, "is to let him feel that you are able and willing to tell him first,

that you give him your confidence."

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Oh, you don't know him," said the boy again.

"Is there any 'out' about your father?" "No" (indignantly)! "You would respect him and admire him; but he is a very severe man."

"Then he has a right to hear and

to hear first from you. You cannot

help him more than by telling him, or hurt him more than by hiding the truth from him."

A day or two later the boy came back to the college office. "My father is a brick!" he said. In his confession he had learned for the first time how much his father cared for him.

A young man, intensely curious about the wickedness of life, is easily persuaded that the first business of a college student is "to know life," - that is, to know the worst things in it; and, in the pursuit of wisdom, he sets out in the evening, with others, merely to see the vice of a great city. He calls at a house where he meets bad men and bad women, and eats and drinks with them. What he eats and drinks he does not know; but in the morning he is still there, with a life stain upon him, and needing more than ever before to confide in father or mother or in some good physician. Yet the people