Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/108

 the leisure time in childhood and youth and early manhood I spent with him was well spent and brought me happiness then and leaves me a pleasant memory today. The experience I had so long ago, any other boy can have if he gives himself to it.

For most of us, boys or men, there are set tasks which occupy definite portions of time. During these periods we are largely the creatures of routine; lessons or routine duties, or business of one sort or another come to us regularly throughout the day, and we have little or no choice but to do them and to ask no questions. We may each of us exercise a certain amount of discretion or individuality in the doing of this work, but in the main it is put before us without our asking, and it is done today in much the same way as it was yesterday. It is only when it comes to our leisure time that the choice of how it may be employed is ours. We are never so much our real selves as during our leisure hours. Eliminating the leisure time which falls to every high school boy during the five working days of the week, there is always Saturday and Sunday in which he is pretty free to follow his own tactics. He can spend his time in things that are trifling or useless or even harmful. He can sleep, or, what is equally bad if not worse, he can sit around doing absolutely nothing but chatter and gossip and loaf. But life is too short even to waste it in youth; there are too many pleasant and profitable things to do, and it is some of these that in these paragraphs I have attempted to suggest. Every boy must