Perhaps we older people are too prone to forget that youth is not a sin to be condemned, or even a folly to be sneered at.  “Wad some power the giftie gie us” to remember that we were not always cool-headed, clear-seeing and middle-aged!  Trouble and responsibility come so soon to all, that we err in forcing young heads to bow, and strong shoulders to bend, beneath a load which should not be laid upon them for many years.  As we advance in age, our weaknesses and temptations change, and no longer take the form of heedlessness, intolerance, extravagance, and most trying of all to the critical and dignified observer,—­freshness.

We may describe this last-named quality somewhat after the fashion of the little boy who defined salt as “What makes potatoes taste bad when they don’t put any on ’em!”

So “freshness” is that which makes youth delightful by its absence.

Unfortunately, it is almost inseparable from this period, and while there are girls, and even boys, in whom the offending quality is nearly, if not entirely, lacking, they are almost as the red herring of the wood, and the strawberry of the sea, in nursery rhyme.

Freshness takes many and varied forms, the most common being that of self-conceit and the desire to appear original and eccentric in feelings, moods, likes and dislikes.  Like the fellows of the club of which Bertie, in “The Henrietta,” was an illustrious member, the average boy winks, nods, looks wise and “makes the other fellows think that he is a Harry of a fellow,—­but he isn’t!”

The desire to be considered worldly-wise—­“tough”—­is rampant in the masculine mind between the ages of fifteen and twenty.  The boy who has been to a strict preparatory boarding-school and is just entering upon his college course, whose theatre-goings have been limited to the “shows” to which his father has given him tickets, or to which he has escorted his mother or sisters, and whose wildest dissipations have consisted in a surreptitious cigarette and glass of beer, neither of which he enjoyed, but both of which he pretended to revel in for the sake of being “mannish,”—­will talk knowingly of “the latest soubrette,” “a jolly little ballet-dancer,” “the wicked ways of this world,” and “the dens of iniquity in our large cities.”  Dickens tells us that “when Mr. Feeder spoke of the dark mysteries of London, and told Mr. Toots that he was going to observe it himself closely in all its ramifications in the approaching holidays, and for that purpose had made arrangements to board with two old maiden aunts at Peckham, Paul regarded him as if he were the hero of some book of travel or wild adventure, and was almost afraid of such a slashing person.”

Why it is considered manly to be “tough” is one of the unsolved mysteries of the boyish mind.  Any uneducated, weak fool can go wrong.  It takes a man to be strong enough to keep himself pure and good.

Another “fresh” characteristic of this age is the pretence of doubt.  A fellow under twenty-one is likely to have doubts, to find articles in the creed of his church “to which he cannot agree.  That kind of thing is well enough for women and children, but for a man of the world,”—­and then follows an expressive pause, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders and lift of the brows.