Recreation is as necessary as work. What kind is to be sought after, and what avoided? For health’s sake, if for nothing else, boys should have some kind of out-door amusements. A boy has an easy choice of good and healthy recreation, and therefore has no excuse for taking up with bad objects. Cricket, Rowing, Volunteering, and such-like, are healthy, and easily obtainable recreations. Gambling, drinking, loitering, are not to be thought of for a moment, they are the curse of the lazy and weak-minded. Theatres are very good if you keep out of the cheap and nasty ones. Music halls are much better avoided. I do not say that it is necessarily wrong to go there, or that you are certain to come to harm if you frequent them, but there is more chance of temptation, and an inferior entertainment for your money. Well acted plays may open out your mind, but the silliness of the music hall entertainment will only react upon you. You can tell a music hall frequenter, not by the words of his mouth so much as by the shuffle of his feet: his highest ambition seems to be to dance the double shuffle, and perhaps sing a few verses of some jingling rhyme. Out-door recreation is not so easily attainable, in the winter, as the time at your disposal is so short. In-door amusements must, to a great extent, take their place. The gymnasium is a good institution; chess is a game worth learning, and very fascinating to some minds; cards are good as long as gambling is avoided, and many other games readily suggest themselves to one’s mind.

Reading will be more to the liking of many. Read books which are worth reading, not the penny trash which shops offer to the boys of England. I should hope that the boys of England have sufficient brains to care for something a little above the penny dreadfuls, otherwise it is a bad look out for the future men of England. Independently of libraries you can now get books, by good writers, as cheap as sixpence—Walter Scott, Fennimore Cooper, Maryatt, Dickens, &c. A word about books. Of course, in books by writers such as I have mentioned you will find many things spoken of which are wrong and ought not to be. They must write so if stories are to be written of life as we find it, and mere goody-goody books, which avoid all mention of such things, are unnatural, and do not give true pictures of life. The harm of too many cheap publications, and not only the cheap ones, is, that in speaking of these things they make them appear unavoidable, and even worthy of praise. Good writers show how revolting crime and evil is, how they can be overcome and resisted, and how truth and honesty must prevail in the end. The difference between good books and plays and bad ones is not so much the subjects they write about as the way in which they speak of them. Some of the cheap literature is only foolish, some is distinctly wicked, but both are better avoided, and your time and money spent on worthier objects. Avoid bad company, and take care that your recreations are manly and honest.