Wolcott Lindsay Senior, with Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and Wolcott Junior’s Mamma, arrived in Boston on New Year’s day, after buffeting for sixty hours against a furious northwest storm that left the great ice-coated liner looking like a glass ship taken from a globe on the nursery shelf and magnified a thousand times. Wolcott Junior, being a healthy, vigorous youth, with thousands of footpounds of energy running hourly to waste, and having the overweening confidence in his own powers which distinguishes some otherwise very attractive specimens of American boyhood, had found the restraint of the cabin extremely irksome. Had the voyage lasted much longer, he must have discovered some means of getting by the barriers which kept him in safe imprisonment. In that case there might have been no Wolcott Lindsay Junior, and no story of “In the Line” to be written.

“Junior,” as his mother called him, was not one to slip by a sentinel unobserved. Five feet eleven in height, unshod; one hundred seventy-five pounds in weight, unclothed; with heart and lungs unstrained by growth, and muscles already swelling in significant bunches and bands, he looked more like a college junior than a raw boy not yet eighteen, still unripe for entrance examinations.

“Ridiculous,” his father had said, lifting his eyes from their five-foot-six-inch level and measuring the whole length and breadth of his offspring,—“perfectly ridiculous to be so big! Why, if you keep on at this rate you’ll be as much out of place in an average house as a rhinoceros in a garret. And not yet even a sub-freshman!”

“Now, Wolcott!” expostulated Mrs. Lindsay, “you know that’s not fair. If you had told us we were going to stay in Hamburg two years instead of six months, we should have put him in a good school or had a tutor for him. It isn’t his fault if he’s behind; he hasn’t had a fair chance.”

At this the expression on the face of Lindsay pÈre changed. “He shall have chance enough when we get home. No more conversation lessons in French and German, or reading novels for vocabulary, or going to the theatre for pronunciation, or rowing on the Elster with that learned fool, Herr Doktor Krauss; but old-fashioned Latin and Greek and mathematics in some good, stiff school, under a clear-headed American teacher. Too bad that the boy couldn’t have had a touch of the Hamburger Gymnasium!”

At this suggestion that hard things were in store for the young man, Mrs. Lindsay looked worried, and Junior assumed an air of indifference that cloaked his real feeling, which was one of joy to be coming home again to boys of his own race and kind, and of willingness to put up with any school or any work, however “stiff,” so long as it was American and with Americans.

Aunt Emmeline met them at the dock. Aunt Emmeline was Mr. Lindsay’s sister, like him and yet differing from him as sisters are wont to differ from brothers. Both were in a sense aristocrats; both thought much of the family name and the family history, but their points of view were widely variant. Mr. Lindsay felt strongly that the possession of ancestors who had served their generation faithfully and well, pledged the descendants to the same ratio of achievement. His constant fear was that he should fail to maintain the standard which the forefathers had set. Aunt Emmeline, on the other hand, regarded the family past as a legacy bequeathed for the glorification of the present. Gentle and charitable and good, she yet loved to think of the Lindsays as an essentially superior race, whom it behooved to keep themselves aloof from the common modern herd, and contemplate in reverence the ancient family greatness.

Both Mr. Lindsay and his sister were experts in the family genealogy. The brother loved to tell of the Lindsay who left a comfortable English benefice to guide a little flock in the wilderness; of the farmer who, with his two sons, ambushed a dozen Indians who attacked his house in the Pequot wars; of the young lieutenant who followed the desperate fortunes of Paul Jones, and was cut in two by a cannon-ball from the Serapis. Miss Emmeline took little interest in the pioneers and the farmers of the family tree. Her tales were of the laces and jewels of Barbara Wolcott, wife of the attorney-general; of the splendid plate lost in the mansion of the great-great-uncle in New Jersey, when pillaged by the Hessians; of the fine estate of the one Tory member of the family, whose daughter became the wife of Lord Stanley of Stanley Hall, Roebuckshire. Aunt Emmeline hoped that Wolcott would exemplify the fine manners and superior breeding of his be-ruffled ancestors; Mr. Lindsay that he might show some traces of the good sense, courage, and sterling worth of the builders and defenders of the colony. And in this hulking, overgrown fellow, no longer a boy and not yet a man, both felt some disappointment.

A few days were required to get the family used to solid earth again, and for picking up the threads of existence severed two years before. Meantime Mr. Lindsay made inquiries for a school for his son. He himself believed in the public schools, not as some of his neighbors, in theory and for other people’s children, but in theory and for his own. Mr. Lindsay had ever the courage of his convictions. So strong was this faith that Mrs. Lindsay, who favored a private school, and Aunt Emmeline, who adored St. Susan’s, had each abandoned her own pet scheme for “little Wolcott,” in the conviction that the public school was inevitable. When, therefore, the head of the family returned one day with the news that Junior, on account of the irregularity of his previous training, and the inflexible system which the public schools maintained, could not prepare at the Latin School without great loss of time, the discussion of schools over Junior’s head, or rather under his nose, became serious. With the public school out of the field, each lady thought to see her own choice adopted. Miss Emmeline’s arguments, boiled down, were that Dr. Cummin, at the head of St. Susan’s, was “such a good man” and some very nice boys went there,—boys, that is, of approved mothers and grandfathers,—and they certainly came back with lovely manners. Mrs. Lindsay urged that the private school offered good instruction, the companionship of boys of the neighborhood, and what was to her of much more account, the opportunity to keep the fledgling a little longer at home. Mr. Lindsay listened, questioned, and like a wise man took time to consider and talk with his friends.

And here was the undoing of both the fond mamma and the solicitous aunt. Mr. Lindsay met Friend Number One at his club at luncheon.

“Do you know anything about schools?” asked the father. “I am looking for the best place in which to put my son. I hear that St. Susan’s is very highly recommended.”

Number One looked at him a moment in thoughtful silence. “Do you? Yes, I suppose some people must recommend it.”

“I infer that you do not. What do you know against it?”

“I know this,” replied the man, energetically; “my nephew entered Harvard last fall from St. Susan’s with a reputation for piety and goodness that any saint might have envied. In three months that fellow had gone to pieces in the temptations of the unaccustomed life like a rotten ship dashed by a hurricane against a reef. He was about as well fitted for the freedom the college offers as I am for the prize ring. Why don’t you put your boy into a good private school right here in the city?”

A little later Mr. Lindsay fell in with Friend Number Two. “Do you know anything about private schools in Boston?”

“Private schools? Yes, there are two or three good ones here,—a little snobbish, of course, but good schools none the less. Ask Tom Smith about them. He’s got two boys in one of them.”

But Mr. Lindsay had no intention of consulting Tom Smith. Snobbishness was his pet aversion; the very mention of the possibility aroused a vehement prejudice. Without stopping to inquire whether the charge were true or false, he abandoned all thought of a private school for the lordly Wolcott Junior, and drifted on to Friend Number Three with mind swept clear of all prepossessions.

Friend Number Three had positive convictions. He was an enthusiastic partisan of the rah-rah sort, alive to the merits and blind to the faults of the school of his boyhood. He knew exactly the place for Wolcott Junior, democratic, cosmopolitan, of high standard of scholarship, with a system of government tending to develop moral independence, and boasting a history rich in names of men of action and service. It happened that the merits which the loyal alumnus ascribed to Seaton were precisely those which Mr. Lindsay thought it most important that a school should possess. It happened also that the next two men consulted gave opinions which either negatively or positively supported Number Three. As a result and despite the preferences of the ladies of the family, Wolcott’s school future was determined. Within a week after his arrival in Boston he was packing his trunk for Seaton.

It need hardly be said that this method of selecting a school, while unquestionably typical, would not always lead to the same result. Friend Number Four, for example, might have contradicted Number Three and Number One, and by lauding St. Susan’s to the skies, have sent the son of the house to the school of Aunt Emmeline’s choice. Or, if the case had been thoroughly investigated, the private school might easily have won the favorable decision. As it was, Mr. Lindsay, in considering the boy and his needs as well as his own ideals, proceeded rather more rationally than the average parent. Many a boy is placed in a particular school merely on the strength of a specious advertisement. Some are ejected from home rather than sent to school, the destination being of much less consequence to the selfish parents than their own relief from responsibility. Others again, through unwholesome dread of evil influences, are turned over to a family of under-masters who wait on them and think for them and keep them in prolonged infancy. But these are extremes of neglect or solicitude. In the end the school is but the opportunity, the vital force is the boy. If the boy is wrong, no school can make him right. Given the right boy in the hands of competent, conscientious men, and the form of the school makes little difference. So thought Mr. Lindsay as he said good-by to his strapping son at Seaton station; and he boarded the train with a clear conscience.