The girl in her teens does think. She has been called careless, thoughtless, inattentive and a day-dreamer. Though these things are often true of her, she is on the whole a thinker. Her day-dreams are thoughtful. In building her air castles she uses memory and imagination, and sometimes one wonders if these factors to which we owe so much do not get as valuable training from “dreams” as from algebra. Certain it is that many women who have helped make the world a more comfortable place in which to live laid plans for their future work on sweet spring days, or long autumn afternoons when Latin grammar faded away in the distance, and things vital, near, and real came to take its place. When Lucy Larcom stood by the noisy loom in the rush and whirl of the big factory, day-dreaming while her busy hands fulfilled their task, memory and imagination were being trained, and one morning the world read the day-dream. At first it was a picture of flowers and fields and cloudless skies, then it came back to the tenements on the narrow streets and said: “If I were a sunbeam, I know where I’d go, Into lowliest hovels, Dark with want and woe. Till sad hearts looked upward, I would shine and shine. Then they’d think of heaven, Their sweet home and mine.” This and many another gem the imagination of the factory girl wrought out beside the loom. The day-dreams, the “castles” reared by the imagination of girlhood, must find expression, and they do—in diaries, “literary productions” and poems at which we sometimes smile. But who shall say that the mental side of the girl in her teens does not get as much valuable training through the closely written journal pages, or the carefully wrought poem which perhaps no one may ever see, as through the “daily theme” or the essay written according to an elaborate outline, carefully criticized by the teacher. The ambitions of the adolescent girl along literary lines often receive a rude shock when her essay is returned with red lines drawn through what, to her, are the most effective adjectives and most beautiful descriptions. Many a literary genius has been destroyed by the red lines of an unimaginative instructor. But there are some wise enough to allow the girl to express herself in true adolescent fashion, criticizing only when errors in punctuation, sentence formation or spelling occur, and letting her gradually outgrow the glaring wealth of imagery that is the right of every girl in her teens.