morals; but to the boy himself who falls into such a habit there is often only the desire to be thought a man.
It was a somewhat puzzled teacher who talked to one of his pupils not long ago. The boy was only seventeen, he came of a very quiet, respectable and even religious family, and he had himself been in the habit of going to church and Sunday school quite regularly. No one had thought of accusing him of hypocrisy or inconsistency, and yet the night before he had been drunk. He could not himself quite explain how or why it had all happened. He had not planned the orgy deliberately, but he had been working hard, he had had little recreation, and he had grown tired of the situation, and, to use his own words, had "just cut loose." Now that it was all over and he had a little time to think, he found no special satisfaction in the memory of his escapade, and, stranger still to his teacher, he had no special regret excepting that his unwise combining of various forms of intoxicants had made him horribly sick and had left him with a coated tongue and a dull headache.
"I don't suppose I'll ever do it again," he said, "but I just had to have that experience once in my life."
He was learning slowly a fact that many boys and their teachers find it difficult to learn, and that is that the main problem of the high school boy whether in school or out is the problem of self-control—control of the body, control of the mind, control of the emotions.
