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THE STORY OF AN ARTIST'S LIKE 11661 A great many boys lose a year and contract bad habits of work, and a great many families lose money which they can ill afford, because they send their boys to schools which do not prepare for the colleges to which they wish their boys to go. Many others waste their money and their children's time by sending them to schools which do not prepare their students well for any college. It may not be for the best interests of a boy's mental development to have him taught the specific things required for the entrance examinations of any particular college. Perhaps the system of entrance by examination is all wrong. Perhaps it forces the schools to cram their students with facts which are more likely to be useful on the examination day than at any other time. Perhaps the schools aim at examination knowledge and not well-rounded instruction. But, whether all these things are true or not, so long as the examination system remains, it is not fair to a boy to make him undergo the ordeal, unless he has had a training which gives him a fair chance to come out creditably in it. He can no more be expected to do well in one kind of an examination when he is prepared for another, than he can be expected to play a good game of football because he has learned tennis. And to put him in unfair competition, where failure is almost certain, is about as bad training for him as could be devised. There is a way to obviate this trouble which is so simple that it is comparatively seldom tried. The offices of the different colleges have the records which the pupils of the various schools have made in entering. There is one school, for example, which for many years has not had a pupil fail to pass a Harvard entrance examination in any subject in which it had recommended him. There are likewise schools which have had similar success in preparing boys for Princeton and Cornell. Of course, it is not necessarily true that the school which prepares its pupils best for the entrance examinations is the best school to choose. Its patronage, its location, its tuition - many things - may make it objectionable. The records of the various schools in getting their students into college will not give a boy's father a reliable basis on which to select a school for his son, but it will enable him to eliminate those schools which would be likely to start the boy on his college career handicapped. It will enable a man to make a list of schools, all of which have shown that they give the training necessary to pass the entrance examinations of the particular college contemplated. The registrar's offices of practically all the larger colleges keep the records of the different schools, and they also send this information to the schools. A study of these records obtained for either of these two sources would aid many families in making what, at its best, is a difficult decision, and give many a boy a better knowledge of how to work, and a better start in college. THE STORY OF AN ARTIST'S LIFE I DECIDING ON HIS CAREER AT THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE-SAVED FROM THE FLOUR BUSINESS BY ILL HEALTH-AN IRRECONCILABLE SHEEP MODEL. BY H.O. TANNER My recollections of Pittsburg, Pa., where I was born, and which I left at about five years of age, are confined singularly enough to the memory of a great Dutch oven. That all the other things, or nearly all, have vanished from my memory makes one inquire, why? What was it that so indelibly impressed this cumbersome structure upon a childish mind? Was it the flames licking the interior with their
