furnish the opportunity to work them out into reality. Real, healthful, natural enthusiasms for all phases of life, she can furnish if she be a normally developed girl. The opportunity to express that enthusiastic abundance of life legitimately is ours to supply.

It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare must have been thinking of the adolescent period of life when he said:

    “There is a tide in the affairs of men,
    Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,
    Omitted, all the voyage of their life
    Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

The teen age is the period where the battle for an honest, clean, pure, righteous type of manhood and womanhood must be waged and won. Having realized this, it now remains for us to bend all our energies and summon all our skill to meet the task.

CHAPTER II—THE PHYSICAL SIDE

That mankind has a spiritual, mental and physical side to his nature has been acknowledged for many centuries. That they are of equal importance has been accepted but for a comparatively short time. Time was when the spiritual nature was developed, the mental side cultivated, and the physical scorned and abused. The pale face and emaciated form were indications of the pure heart. The starved body meant the well nourished soul. When men were most deeply concerned with the future beyond the grave, and this life was but a penance, a period to be endured, a terrible battle to win, having little joy, and almost no pleasure not labeled wicked, it was natural that they should treat with a measure of scorn or ignore altogether the physical body in which dwelt so much of evil. But when man realized that eternity begins here and now, he turned his thoughts to the present welfare of his fellows, and the physical side assumed a new importance.

In some cases the importance attached to physical welfare is out of proportion. It is always difficult to keep a sense of proportion when new light on any line of truth bursts upon men’s minds. But in the main the place of the physical side is not exaggerated. Every teacher in the public school realizes it as she sees what a tremendous difference has been made in the spiritual and intellectual development of a child who after years of ineffectual struggle to see has been given glasses that make it possible for him to do the same work as his classmates. She realizes it as with astonishment she sees a boy transformed before her eyes, changed into an entirely different child as the weeks and months pass, because the troublesome and deadening adenoids have been removed. She realizes it as she sees a poor, weak little girl, undersized and underfed, changed into a new being under treatment, with plenty of nourishing food and fresh air. The experience of the past ten years alone, in the public schools, will convince one of the value of the physical.

Certain it is that the physical side exists, and is to be reckoned with in the development of human life to the highest possible point. The more we know about the physical side, the more we stand in awe of ourselves, and the more we appreciate the wonderful machine with which we are to do our work in the world.

I saw recently two locomotives that taught me again what it all means. One had been in a wreck and lay pitched over on its side, its splendid power gone. Its size and its powerful strength made its ruin more pitiful, and its utter helplessness appealed strongly to all who looked at it. Near it on the second track, all hot and panting, ready and waiting to pull its heavy load up the steep grade, was a fellow engine, in full possession of its powers: how strong, how complete, how perfectly able to perform its task it seemed as it stood there on the track beside its helpless brother. For days I could not forget the picture, and when I looked into the faces of my girls in their teens all it suggested impressed me anew.

How I should like to have them fully equipped physically to meet the demands which life will bring to them! The girl in her teens has a physical side of tremendous significance and importance, for it is during these years that she develops her powers or wrecks them. It is her time of rapid growth, of severe tax upon every part of her physical being. It is during these years she meets her crises.

We have seen that early in her teens a girl begins to care “how she looks.”

She should be encouraged to look well. She should dress carefully, which does not mean expenditure of much money, but does mean thought. She should be taught that dress means much, and physical condition even more.

But all this, some teachers may say, belongs in the home. It is the duty of the home to look after these things. Yes, it is true. And it is a cause for thanksgiving that in so many homes, sweet, patient, wise mothers watch over their girls and give them what they need. But every Sunday-school teacher of girls in their teens has at least one girl whose mother does not or can not help at the time when help is most needed. Some have had no training themselves and do not see the need; some are crushed by the multitude of burdens, some are careless, and some have no knowledge as to how to cope with the wilfulness of girls which sometimes appears in the years of adolescence. “The whole need not a physician, but they that are sick,” the great Teacher said once, and it is true to-day. Both the public school and the Sunday-school exist to cultivate all of good that appears in the girl’s life, and develop what she lacks.

Here is a group of girls in a certain Sunday-school class, most of them well taken care of physically, but with very little of direct teaching and development morally. They are selfish, self-centered, and vain. The teacher’s task is clear. Here is another class in a nearby church, suffering not only from moral and intellectual neglect, but from physical as well. Again the teacher’s task is plain.

We have seen that buried deep in the heart of every adolescent girl is the desire to be attractive, to be popular, to have people “like” her. This desire prompts her often to little acts of courtesy and kindness and efforts to be agreeable; more often it prompts her to make herself physically attractive. Take a walk through any park, along the boulevards, up the main street of small manufacturing towns, or watch any high school group at the hour of dismissal: if your eyes are open you will be conscious of the struggle to be attractive,—to look well. It is registered in hair and hats, bows and chains and pins. Sometimes it appears in fads in dress,—low shoes and silk stockings in winter, or the strange combination of no hat, a very thin coat, and a huge muff. These are the things that make the people of common sense ask the very pertinent question, “What are these girls’ mothers thinking of?” It is a hard question to answer satisfactorily. Often the mothers have helplessly yielded under the power of that insistent phrase, “All the girls do.”

If once these girls can be made to see the attractiveness of absolute cleanliness, of the charm of simple but spotless clothing, of teeth, hair, hands and skin that show care, a great deal will have been done toward helping their general physical condition.

Anything which has to do with personal appearance must be handled with great tact, for the adolescent girl is sensitive and she resents direct criticism. But on the other hand she accepts eagerly anything which promises to help her look well. If a