Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/99

 we do them damage. It is the boy who has learned to do a task that is given him whether he likes it or not, who can direct himself and look after himself, who does not shrink from difficult and unpleasant things, who does not hesitate at sacrifice or self-control, who has been taught to think of the comfort and pleasure of others as well as of his own—it is this sort of boy who is going to get on in college and whose home training will show before he has been in the college community a week. Such boys are to a college officer like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. The spoiled, humored boy who has been kept from hardships and sacrifice, no matter with what loving care, will hardly escape a weak youth and a selfish ineffective manhood.

A brown thrasher has a nest in our sweet honeysuckle, and for weeks we have been interested in watching her movements. Just now she is teaching her children to fly, and it seems to an onlooker no trifling task. I said "children," for though we have never so trespassed upon the privacy of our shy tenant as to look into her dwelling, I am sure from the way in which she has been conducting her child's education that there is more than one little thrasher in the nest. It was no only child who was being put through his exercises this morning.

The first sound that caught my ear when I wakened was the voice of the mother, firm and insistent, directing and encouraging her child. When I went to the window I saw the prospective young aeronaut, tailless and nervous, perched on the telephone wire. He was very tottery and was whimpering audibly, but I could tell from the strong notes of his mother's