366 PLAIN FACTS FOB OLD AND YOUNG 



the vices of their elders, rather than the virtues of true 

 manliness. A strong evidence of this fact, if there were 

 no other, is the unnaturally old-looking faces which 

 so many of our boys present. At the present time the 

 average boy of twelve knows more of vice and sin than 

 the youth of twenty of the past generation. 



Human Mushrooms.— It is not so much for these 

 human mushrooms, which may be not inaptly compared 

 to toadstools which grow up in a single night and al- 

 most as speedily decay, that we write, but for the old- 

 fashioned boys, the few such there may be; those who 

 have not yet learned to love sin ; those whose minds are 

 still pure and uncontaminated ; those who are not 

 ashamed to be counted as boys, who are an ornament 

 to boyhood and a delight to their parents. Those who 

 have already begun a course of vice and wickedness we 

 have little hope of reforming; but we are anxious to 

 offer a few words of counsel and warning which may 

 possibly help to save as brands plucked from a blazing 

 fire, those whose moral sense is yet alive, who have 

 quick and tender consciences, who aspire to be truly 

 noble and good. We trust, however, that a few who 

 may have already entered upon a course of sin will 

 heed the warnings given, and reform before they have 

 been wholly ruined by the terrible consequences of vice. 



"What Are Boys For?"— This question was an- 

 swered with exact truthfulness by a little boy, who, 

 when contemptuously accosted by a man with the re- 

 mark, "Wliat are you good for?" replied, ''Men are 

 made of such as we." Boys are the beginnings of men. 

 They sustain the same relation to men that a small 

 shrub does to a full-grown tree. They are still more 

 like the small green apples which first appear when 

 the blossoms drop from the branches, compared with 



