need not be behind the best.  At some stage in life, and especially in the years of rapid growth, we all need encouragement, and often characters that seem to require only repression are merely singing out of tune from the effort to hold out against blank discouragement at their failures to “be good,” or to divert their mind forcibly from their fits of depression.  To be scolded accentuates their trouble and tends to harden them; to grow a shell of hardness seems for the moment their only defence; but if some one will meet their efforts half-way, believing in them with a tranquil conviction that they will live through these difficulties and find themselves in due time, they can be saved from much unhappiness of their own making, though not of their own fault, and their growth will not be arrested behind an unnatural shell of defence.

The strong vitality and gift of encouragement which can give this help are also of value in saving from the morbid and exaggerated friendships which sometimes spoil the best years of a girl’s education.  If the character of those who teach them has force enough not only to inspire admiration but to call out effort, it may rouse the mind and will to a higher plane and make the things of which it disapproves seem worthless.  There are moments when the leading mind must have strength enough for two, but this must not last.  Its glory is to raise the mind of the learner to equality with itself, not to keep it in leading strings, but to make it grow so that, as the master has often been outstripped by the scholar, the efforts of the younger may even stimulate the achievements of the elder, and thus a noble friendship be formed in the pursuit of what is best.

Educators of youth are exposed to certain professional dangers, which lie very close to professional excellences of character.  There is the danger of remaining young for the sake of children, so that something of mature development will be lacking.  If there is not a stimulus from outside, and it is not supplied for by an inward determination to grow, the mental development may be arrested and contented-ness at a low level be mistaken for the limit of capacity.  A great many people are mentally lazy, and only too ready to believe that they can do no more.

Many teachers are yoked to an examination programme sufficiently loaded to call for a great deal of pressure along a low level, and they may easily mistake this harassing activity for real mental work, and either be indeed hindered, or consider themselves absolved from anything more.  The penalty of it is a gradual decline of the unused powers, growing difficulty of sustained attention, dislike for what requires effort of mind, loss of wider interests, restlessness and superficiality in reading, and other indications of diminution of power in the years when it ought to be on the increase.  Is this the fault of those who so decline in power?  It would be hard to say that it is so universally, for some no doubt are pressed