46 BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA strictly in advance, is usually sufficient as membership sub- scription. A Penny Savings Bank should be started to enable boys to put by money wherewith to pay for outings, and eventually to start them in the practice of thrift. I even advocate taking the boys to the theatre to see some- thing really good — as a very great inducement to them to save the money necessary to pay for their seats, and thus a first step in thrift.
PLAYS
Boys are full of romance, and they love " make-believe " to a greater extent than they like to show. All you have to do is to play up to this, and to give rein to your imagination to meet their requirements. But you have to treat with all seriousness the many tickling incidents that will arise; the moment you laugh at a situation the boys are quick to feel that it is all a farce and to lose faith in it forth- with and forever. For instance, in instructing a patrol to make the call of its tutelary animal, the situation borders on the ridiculous, but if the instructor remains perfectly serious the boys work at it with the idea that it is " business " — and, once accomplished, the call becomes a fetish for esprit de corps among the members of the patrol. To stand on the right footing for getting the best out of your boys you must see things with their eyes. To you the orchard must, as it is with them, be Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the background; the fishing harbor must be the Spanish Main with its pirates and privateers ; even the town common may be a prairie teeming with buffaloes and Red Indians, or the narrow slum a mountain gorge where live the bandits or the bears. (Read the Golden Age," by Kenneth Graham, and "Two Little Savages," by E. T. Seton.) Once you take this line you see how deadly dreary and how wasteful seems the dull routine of drill upon which the un- imaginative scoutmaster falls back for his medium of instruc- tion.
