TWELVE YEARS WITH MY BOYS.
Twelve Years with My Boys. (Methuen and Co. 3s. 6d. net.)— The whole growth of philanthropic clubs in London has come about in the last fifty years, and there are still very many Londoners who have never been inside a club and have no idea of the vast work going on around them among young men and women. To these it would be useless to recommend this book, for they would not understand it, and would see only its sometimes serious and always annoying faults of style; but to those who are already working, or who are starting on their labours, it will be a most excellent help. The author, who does not give her name, has for twelve years held a Bible class on Sundays and a games club on Wednesdays and Saturdays in some outlying part of London, and, although the boys were not apparently of a very rough class, has grasped and faced the difficulties connected with club work—the impossibility of com- peting in material advantages with polytechnics and evening schools, and the baffling contrast between what a boy will believe in his heart and what he will put into practice in his life. And she has grasped not only the difficulties and uphill work of a club, but also its amazing power for good and its ever-changing humour. Those who themselves have laboured will acknowledge that only a genuine club worker could know that "if a chair is in good condition they will take an honest pride in it, but directly a chair is an object of pity they must needs begin to bang it about." Phrases like this bear witness throughout the book to a real experience of the pleasures and pains of club life.
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