unpunctual, to keep people waiting?  Because we inflict pain and inconvenience upon those who are in a certain measure dependent for their comfort on our promptness and punctuality.  Why is it bad manners to sprawl in one’s seat, to assume ungainly attitudes, to make grimaces, or to munch peanuts or apples in the cars or in public places?  For the same reason.  We make those who witness such conduct uncomfortable, and inflict pain upon them.

One very common cause of discomfort and pain caused by young people to their parents and teachers is want of thoughtfulness and consideration.  For one-half the faults for which young people need to be reproved the reply is, “I didn’t think.”  Now, while we cannot expect young folks to exercise the thoughtfulness and judgment of maturer people, we certainly have a right to expect that they will endeavor to acquire a habit of thoughtfulness in regard to the convenience and interests of others.  It is this want of thoughtfulness that often betrays young people into doing very improper and injurious things.  Parents and teachers are constantly troubled by finding that their children and pupils do things which they never thought of forbidding them to do.  That which all good and faithful teachers strive to do is to develop in their pupils such a sense of propriety and thoughtfulness and such a high moral sense as will make them a law for right unto themselves.  They want to cultivate and to see them cultivating in themselves a strong practical common-sense and a wise sense of propriety.  Without such common-sense and innate sense of propriety, the longest set of rules would be useless.  For instance, if your teachers were to set about making a set of rules do you suppose any one of them would have thought of making such rules as:  “Young ladies are not permitted to go to the roof of the house and sit with their feet dangling over the railings of the balcony;” or “Young ladies must not go into people’s pastures and catch their ponies to go riding;” or “When young ladies are out riding in a buggy it is not allowable for one of the young ladies to ride on the horse which the others are driving.”

A hundred rules might be gotten up forbidding the doing of a hundred things, the only evil of which is that they are outlandish and unbecoming; not modest, or ill-mannered, and behind which there is no evil intent—­only thoughtlessness.  The same endowment of common sense ought to teach young people to do those things which will promote their health, and not to do those things which would injure it.  The greatest blessing to a young person, especially to a young woman, is good health; but unless she will take care of it herself, it is an almost hopeless task to attempt to take care of it for her.  You may have heard the somewhat slangy expression sometimes made about stupid and conceited young men, that they “don’t know enough to come in when it rains.”  It is, however, an almost just complaint of many a pretty and otherwise sensible young woman that she apparently doesn’t know enough to put on overshoes when it rains, or to change thin clothing for thick when it grows cold.  There is needed among young girls everywhere such a development of common-sense as will prevent this senseless and thoughtless conduct.