The streets and suburban lanes of our little Western towns and cities offer great facilities for the study of happy girlhood, large thanks to the bicycle. During my summer walks and drives I meet whisps and flocks and bevies of lasses, or they pass me at scorching speed. They put the “bicycle-face” to shame with their rippling countenances and merry chatter. I shall never, I hope, forget one little maid of fifteen who drove her wheel as straight and steady as a flying quail, with her arms folded on her breast, and her lithe body poised inimitably. She looked at me with big round eyes, as if to say: “Do you see how I can do this?” Indeed, my enjoyment of the frank sweetness in the air where girls are at play would be perfect were it not for the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” so often in evidence; but for him, all becurled and beruffled, I have a supreme and stony aversion. If some ruddy, ragged urchin, of the true Adamic race, would but down him and bedaub him with mud! If some girl would spank him and send him home; but the girl seems actually to like the self-conscious and unnatural little scamp. She smoothes his collar and pulls down his velvet jacket, hugs him and calls him pet names. He is the fellow who will grow up to be gun-shy, and inclined to marry a double-divorced actress, much to the girl’s disgust. It was Madame de Staël, I believe, who said: “Let my children be not girls; for a woman’s life is so sad.” Even she, however, did not find girlhood unhappy, and the preventive to be used against the misery of womanhood would be to hold on to girlish simplicity, faith, and sanity as long as possible. We grow like what we contemplate, and the question is, do we now-a-days give adequate contemplation to the true, the beautiful, and the good, whose symbol and measure is the heart of a healthy girl? Our civilization must luxuriate in what maidenhood can safely assimilate, or it must grovel at the feet of the yellow woman, tough and _passée_. There is encouraging evidence, visible just now, of a desire on the public’s part to get rid of Old Mrs. Woman, and take up once more with her granddaughter, the not wholly unsophisticated, but yet quite innocent and undesigning maiden. Men of the right sort have always felt that the happy married woman should be sheltered from publicity, and that the unhappy wife’s sorrows are sacred; but the love of a youth and a maid, that is something for the delight of the whole world. We are tired of this rank immorality tricked out in the toggery of love,—and the lovers married to other folk,—this rank immorality of the old blasé hero and the adroit, conscienceless and time-battered heroine.