University of Virginia Library

16. A FEW WORDS TO BOYS AND GIRLS.

We have a few words to say to boys and girls together. You are to become the men and women of the next generation, when your fathers and mothers have retired from active life. Twenty years from to-day the world will be just what the present boys and girls shall make it. Boys who are chaste, honest, obedient, and industrious, will become noble and useful men, husbands, and fathers. Girls who are pure, innocent, and dutiful, will become honored and lovely women, wives, and mothers.

Boys and girls are placed in families together, and thus are evidently designed by nature to associate together, to obtain their education and preparation for life together. When secluded wholly from each other's society, both suffer a loss. But while this is true, it is also true that certain evils may and often do grow out of the association of the two sexes of young people, so serious in character that many wise and good men and women have felt that the sexes should be reared and educated apart as much as possible. These evils are the result of too intimate and improper associations of boys and girls. Associations of this sort must be most sedulously avoided. Boys and girls who are in school together must be extremely careful to avoid too close associations. On all occasions a modest reserve should be maintained in the deportment of the young of both sexes toward each other. Too early intimacies often lead to hasty marriages, before either party is prepared to enter into the married state, and before the judgment

has been sufficiently developed to make either capable of selecting a suitable partner for life. These facts are usually learned when it is too late for the information to be of any value.

Parents and teachers are especially responsible for guarding these early associations, and giving timely warning when needed. The youth should always be ready to take advice on this subject, for with their inexperience, they cannot know their wants so well as do their elders. Nothing is more disgusting to persons of sound sense than youthful flirtations. Those misguided persons who encourage these indiscretions in young people, do an immense amount of injury to those whom they ought to be prepared to benefit by wise counsel. We have seen promising young people made wretched for life through the influence of one of these mischief-makers, being most unhappily mated, and repenting too late of a hasty marriage for which they were utterly unprepared.

Young persons often labor under the erroneous impression that in order to be agreeable they must talk "small talk;" this literally means, "silly twaddle," which disgusts everybody, and yet which all seek to imitate. Whenever the two sexes meet in society or elsewhere, as at all other times, the conversation should be turned upon subjects of real interest, which admit of the exercise of sound sense and will be a means of culture. Such associations do not result in injury to any one, and may be the means of much profit; but nothing is more execrable than the frivolous, silly, often absolutely senseless observations which make up the great bulk of the conversation of young people in fashionable society.

A most ready means of disclosing the superficial character of the minds of a large share of the young persons who move in fashionable circles is to introduce some topic requiring depth of thought and sound judgment. Such a subject will usually produce either an instant lull in the conversation, or a display of ignorance which cannot fail to reveal the shallowness of the speaker's intellect. It is this superficial class of minds that most easily fall victims to a sickly sentimentalism, which readily leads to digressions from the pathway of rigid virtue.

A boy who has the elements of true manliness in him, will carry a gentlemanly bearing wherever he goes. In all his deportment, and especially in his conduct toward the opposite sex, he will act the gentleman; and the boy whose gentility is genuine will manifest the same kind deference toward his mother and sisters as toward other ladies and girls. So also the young lady who is a lady at heart, will never allow herself to forget the rules of propriety, whether she is in the company of her father and brothers, or that of other gentlemen.

All the rules of etiquette are worth little compared with the one simple rule which is applicable to both sexes and all ages, — "Have the heart right, and then act natural." One so governed will not go very far astray under any circumstances; but it is of the greatest importance that the heart be right. To make it such is, indeed, the great business of life. "BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART."