ABSTRACT
Everybody who has much to do with boys comes, in time, to prefer the boy who is sometimes ‘bad’ to the boy who is invariably ‘good’. The boy who fills the master’s desk with frogs, puts mice in the way of the maids, steals the apples in the orchard before they are ripe and absents himself from class when there is a circus is a ‘bad’ boy and is likely to be frequently punished, though such punishment is merely a conventional folly. But in the very moment of punishing him any sensible schoolmaster will prefer him to the ‘good’ boy who obeys every precept to the letter and always says ‘yes, sir’, or ‘no, sir’, as circumstances demand.
