n echo in college reunions everywhere;
and gray-haired men, who outside the narrowing circle of home have not
heard their first names for years, remain Bill and Joe and John and
George to college comrades, even if unseen for more than a generation.

Yet a girl should go to college not merely to obtain four happy years
but to make a second gain, which is often overlooked, and is little
understood even when perceived; I mean a gain in health. The old notion
that low vitality is a matter of course with women; that to be delicate
is a mark of superior refinement, especially in well-to-do families;
that sickness is a dispensation of Providence,--these notions meet with
no acceptance in college. Years ago I saw in the mirror frame of a
college freshman's room this little formula: "Sickness is
carelessness, carelessness is selfishness, and selfishness is sin."
And I have often noticed among college girls an air of humiliation and
shame when obliged to confess a lack of physical vigor, as if they were
convicted of managing life with bad judgment, or of some moral
delinquency. With the spreading scientific conviction that health is a
matter largely under each person's control, that even inherited
tendencies to disease need not be allowed to run their riotous course
unchecked, there comes an earnest purpose to be strong and free.
Fascinating fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored;
possibilities of doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new
and dear friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and
work, and the young student cannot afford quivering nerves or small
lungs or an aching head any more than bad taste, rough manners, or a
weak will. Handicapped by inheritance or bad training, she finds the
plan of college life itself her supporter and friend. The steady,
long-continued routine of mental work, physical exercise, recreation,
and sleep, the simple and wholesome food, in place of irregular and
unstudied diet, work out salvation for her. Instead of being left to
go out-of-doors when she feels like it, the regular training of the
gymnasium, the boats on lake and river, the tennis court, the golf
links, the basket ball, the bicycle, the long walk among the woods in
search of botanical or geological specimens,--all these and many more
call to the busy student, until she realizes that they have their
rightful place in every well-ordered day of every month. So she
learns, little by little, that buoy