teacher does not feel equal to the task of assisting the girl to make the best of her physical side she can find some one to help her. I know of one class of girls in their teens who will never forget the talk given by a bright, attractive, clever woman at the monthly social, on “Tales Told by Belts,” and not a girl in the Girls’ Club, I know, ever forgot the talk on “Sometimes the Head Rules and Sometimes the Feet.” More girls than usual wore rubbers the next rainy day, and some high heels disappeared.

Perhaps one of the most helpful of the little incidental ways by which the Sunday-school teachers may help is through praise. I have in mind now a girl of sixteen who usually selected her own clothes, and seemed to have a talent for putting together the wrong colors. One spring, she, in some way, was persuaded by another girl to have her coat, dress and hat all in browns that harmonized. One can hardly imagine the change it made in the girl. She realized it. That Sunday in the hall, I told her very quietly that she looked “dear,” that she must never wear anything except soft colors that harmonized; that I loved to look at her. She showed her pleasure. The next January she asked me one night if I thought dark blue would be all right for her new suit if she got “everything to match.”

No one can associate sympathetically with the girl in her teens week after week and not be concerned about her physical welfare. There are so many pale, anemic, tired girls that move one’s heart. Some work too hard. Many live under unhygienic conditions. Many can not stand the pressure and rush of school and social life. Great numbers suffer from improper food, and many more because they do not get enough sleep. Almost every Sunday I hear some girl say she “went somewhere every night last week.” This mania for “going” seizes so many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring.

So many of our girls are “nervous.” A bright, interesting eighth grade teacher told me recently that she had fifty girls in her class and that according to their mothers forty-one were “very nervous.” It seemed to her a large proportion even for girls in their early teens, and she began a quiet study of some of them. One of the “very nervous” girls who, her mother thought, must be taken out of school for a while, takes both piano and violin lessons, attends dancing school, goes to parties now and then, and rarely retires before ten o’clock. Another “very nervous” girl takes piano lessons, goes to the moving picture shows once or twice a week, hates milk, can’t eat eggs, doesn’t care much for fruit, and is extremely fond of candy. In each case investigated there seemed to be much outside of school work which could explain the “nervousness.”

It is most interesting to note the gain, physically, made by almost every girl in her teens who enters a good boarding-school, where plenty of exercise, a cheerful atmosphere, regular hours and wholesome food is the rule.

Just how much the Sunday-school teacher who is a real friend of the girl in her teens can help is a question, but I know of enough cases where an earnest interview with the father or mother has resulted in better care of the growing girl, with more attention paid to her food and rest, to make me sure that it pays to attempt to help. If it only means that the girl in her teens shall not go to school or to work without breakfast, it pays.

I can almost hear some troubled teacher ask, “Where in the Sunday-school hour is there time for this?” It can not be done in a Sunday-school hour except incidentally. But those who are at work with girls in their teens must teach more than a lesson on Sunday. They are teaching girls to live, if they have entered whole-heartedly into the work.

Every girl in her teens is interested in her physical self. The ways in which she strives to satisfy her curiosity and desire for knowledge are often pitiful, often to be deplored.

From my experience I am convinced that anything which tends to center her interest upon the physical is unwise. For this reason I very much doubt the advisability of class instruction, except in general matters of hygiene. What the whole class is interested in they will discuss. It will be the main topic of conversation among “chums” as they separate after class, and the effect I am convinced is bad, simply because it centers thought upon a subject which to the girl in her teens should not be the chief interest. Then, too, the individuals in a class vary so much that the instruction to be given needs special wisdom, tact and comprehensive knowledge of girls which not every teacher possesses.

That instruction should be given, and that questions must be answered, is true. A girl’s mother is the natural and best agency through which knowledge should come to her, and the Sunday-school teacher may very easily enlist the mother’s sympathy, urge her to be true to her daughter’s need, and show her how necessary it is that she faithfully instruct her child in the things she needs to know. If the mother says, as is often the case, that she can’t, that she does not know how, etc., then the teacher may offer to help with suggestions, with books, or, if the mother asks her to do so, may talk with the girl herself. Such a conversation on the part of the teacher should never be forced, but introduced naturally and easily in some opportune moment. Sometimes, if there is real confidence and sympathy between pupil and teacher, the girl herself will open the way.

In a hundred ways, both in teaching and in conversation with the girls, the Sunday-school teacher may show her own respect for the physical side of life, the marvel of it all, and the need on the part of every woman to obey its unchanging laws, from which, if broken, there is no escape. In scores of ways she will frankly and naturally reveal to her girls her sympathy with womanhood everywhere, in every walk of life, and especially her respect for mothers, and her love for helpless childhood.

Girls learn so much more, and the impressions made are far deeper, through this almost unconscious influence of the teacher than through the “lecture” or “lesson.” I shall not soon forget the impression made upon a class of girls of eighteen years of age by the preparation of a complete outfit to be presented to a poor woman whose child was to come into the world in a tiny third-story room amidst deepest poverty. As one of the girls said, “It will be a lucky baby, after all, with eight of us to look after it.” Both teacher and girls felt new bonds of sympathy long before the last tiny garments were finished, and the girls had learned much.

It is not good for girls in their teens, especially in the latter part of the period, to be closely associated with women who are cynical, who have forgotten the tenderness of their own girlhood dreams, or who are out of sympathy with the great fundamentals of life.

The teacher may so easily reveal, too, her respect for the conventionalities of life. In her escape from the narrowing influences of the conventionalities of older countries, the American girl has gone so far into liberty that she does not realize the protection that lies behind simple conventionality. While it is perfectly true that a girl may travel alone from one end of this country to the other with safety, it is not true that it is wise for her to do so. Fathers are beginning to realize it, and daughters though not “in society” are enjoying the assurance that, if obliged for social or business reasons to be out late, their fathers will