ittle discipline, plenty of
play, and a fair chance to be glad and sorry as the hours swing
by,--these things are not too much to grant to childhood. That
careful coddling which deprives a child of all delicate and strong
emotions lest it be saddened, or excited, or alarmed, leaves it
dangerously soft of fibre. Coleridge, an unhappy little lad at school,
was lifted out of his own troubles by an acquaintance with the heroic
sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there
is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some
strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible
to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and
moral force in the development of youth.

There are people who surrender themselves without reserve to
needless activities, who have a real affection for telephones, and
district messengers, and the importunities of their daily mail. If
they are women, they put special delivery stamps on letters which
would lose nothing by a month's delay. If they are men, they exult
in the thought that they can be reached by wireless telegraphy on
mid-ocean. We are apt to think of these men and women as painful
products of our own time and of our own land; but they have probably
existed since the building of the Tower of Babel,--a nerve-racking
piece of work which gave peculiar scope to strenuous and impotent
energies.

A woman whose every action is hurried, whose every hour is open to
disturbance, whose every breath is drawn with superfluous emphasis,
will talk about the nervous strain under which she is living, as
though dining out and paying the cook's wages were the things which
are breaking her down. The remedy proposed for such "strain" is
withdrawal from the healthy buffetings of life,--not for three days,
as Burke withdrew in order that he might read "Evelina," and be rested
and refreshed thereby; but long enough to permit of the notion that
immunity from buffetings is a possible condition of existence,--of
all errors, the most irretrievable.

It has been many centuries since Marcus Aurelius observed the fretful
disquiet of Rome, which must have been strikingly like our fretful
disquiet to-day, and proffered counsel, unheeded then as now: "Take
pleasure in one thing and rest in it, passing from one social act
to another, thinking of God."

The Girl Graduate

"When I find learning and wisdom united in one person, I do not wait
t