A Girls Student Days and After | Page 3

the student who does her best; and because it is her best, the work, though not brilliant, is distinguished by virtue of her effort. She may be the girl who is to make a happy home life through her poise and earnestness and common sense. Whoever she is, in any event in learning to do her best she is winning nine-tenths of the battle of a successful career. It is she, attractive, able, earnest, with the "fair-play" or team-play spirit in all she does, true to herself and to others, whom every school wants, whose unconscious influence is so great in building up the morale of any school. Mark this girl and follow her, for she is worthy of your hero worship.
This is the girl who goes into school in much the same spirit that she would enter upon a larger life. She is not a prig and she is not a dig, but she knows there are responsibilities to be met and she meets them. She expects to have to think about the new conditions in which she finds herself and to adjust herself to them, and she does it. She knows the meaning of the team-play spirit and she takes her place quietly on the team, one among many, and both works and plays with respect for the rights and positions of others. It is in the temper of the words sometimes stamped upon the coins of our country--E Pluribus Unum--that she makes a success of her school life. She knows that not only is our country bigger than any one of its states, but also that every school is bigger than any one of its members whether teacher or student. In a small family at home conditions have been more or less made for her, just as they are for other girls. Yet she knows that the school life is complicated and complex, and it is impossible for her to feel neglected where a more self-centred or spoiled girl fails to see that in this new life she is called upon to play a minor part but nevertheless a part upon which the school must rely for its esprit de corps. She goes with ease from the somewhat unmethodical life of the home to the highly organized routine of the school because she understands the meaning of the word "team-play." She has the co?perative spirit.
Yet there are other girls, too, in this school which the freshman is entering. There is the student who errs on the side of leading too workaday a life, and in so doing has lost something of the buoyancy and breadth and "snap" which would make her associations and her work fresher and more vigorous. "The Grind," she has been called, and if she recognize herself in this sketch, let her take care to reach out for a bigger and fuller life than she is leading. And there is, too, the selfish student whose "class-spirit" is self-spirit; and the girl who is not selfish but who uses herself up in too many interests, dramatic, athletic, society, philanthropic and in a dozen others. She is probably over-conscientious, a good girl in every way, but in doing too much she loses sight of the real aim of her school life. To these must be added another student,--the freshman who skims the surface, and is, when she gets out, where she was when she entered--no, not quite so far along, for she has slipped back. She is selfish, relying upon the patience and burden-bearing capacity of her father and mother, as well as the school.
No doubt every girl would meet her obligations squarely if she realized what was the underlying significance of the freshman year; the school life would surely be approached with a conscientious purpose. What a girl gets in school will much depend upon what she has to give. No girl is there simply to have a good time or merely to learn things out of books. Nor is she there to fill in the interim between childhood and young womanhood, when one will go into society, another marry, and a third take up some wage-earning career. No, she is there to carry life forward in the deepest, truest sense; and the longer she can have to get an education and to make the best of the opportunities of school and college life, the richer and fuller her after-years will be. Both middle life and old age will be deeper and stronger. Let us think about these girls, let us think about what it means to be a freshman, and so lessen our difficulties and increase our pleasures; let us have a big conception,--a large ideal always at heart--of what the first year should be, and beginning well we shall be the more likely