of bad manners. The ill-bred young man smokes all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and even in his mother’s drawing-room. He may be traced from room to room by the litter of newspapers and magazines he leaves behind him. The present fashion of taking one’s reading in pills, so to speak, snatching it in scrappy paragraphs from weekly miscellanies, is but too favourable to this lack of order. In this young man’s own room there is chaos. The maids have endless trouble in clearing up after him. His tobacco is spilled over tables, chairs, and carpets. His handkerchiefs, ties, socks, and collars are lying about in every corner of the room. He is too indolent even to put his boots outside the door at night that they may be cleaned in the morning. To save himself trouble he bangs all the doors instead of gently latching them. And yet, perhaps, if he could but realise that all this is “bad manners,” he would become as neat as he is now the reverse, and would be as decorative at table as he is, at the present moment, unornamental.

“Young” men not alone culpable.

It is not only young men whose standard of behaviour in the home is a low one. Masters of the house, fathers of families, men of middle age, who are terribly put out if any one fails in duty to them, are sometimes conspicuously ill-bred in everyday matters. They are late for every meal, to the discomfort of the other members of the family and the great inconvenience of the servants. Polite to the world outside, they are brusque and disagreeable in their manner at home: rough to the servants, rude to their wives, and irritable with their children. Sometimes a good heart and considerable family affection are hidden away behind all this, but the families of such men would be very glad to compound for a little less affection and hidden goodness and rather more gentleness and outward polish.

On strong language.

Apart from faults of temper, men fall into careless habits of speech and manner at home, and one form of this, viz., habitually using strong language in the presence of women and children, is particularly offensive. Besides, it defeats itself; for if the forcible expressions are intended to express disapprobation, they soon become weak and powerless to do so, because they are used on every possible occasion. After a time they lose all meaning.

A typical family.

The secret of the whole matter.

The feminine motive.

I know a family where there are sons and daughters, the latter charming and in every respect young gentlewomen. But the sons fall far below their level. They come to the door with thundering knocks that make every one in the house start disagreeably with surprise, walk through the hall without introducing their muddy boots to either scraper or doormat, sit down to meals without the usual preliminary of hand- washing and hair-brushing, and are altogether rough and unpresentable. If friends call at the house these young men rush away from the chance of encountering them; or, if they cannot help meeting them, they blush scarlet, look very gauche and uncomfortable, and feel miserable. They knock things over out of pure awkwardness, and never realise that the secret of the whole matter is the want of self-training. Girls are animated by a greater wish to please, an amiable desire that need not be confounded with vanity, and this wish has led the sisters of these young men to practise those small acts of daily self- denial which after awhile produce the highest self-culture so far as manners go. What is habitual neatness but constant coercion of human nature’s innate indolence? What is politeness in the home but the outcome of affection and self-respect, and the suppression of all those natural instincts of self-seeking that, allowed their way, produce the worst manners in the world?

The young man every one loves.

“Gentle, yet virile.”