Love is rather like a building with foundations set into the earth--foundations solid, firmly laid and durable. How can people love when they do not know each other? Acquaintance first, then friendship, comradeship; then, if the sentiment grows, love. But how are young people to get really acquainted? They meet under unreal conditions. They see each other in society, in Sunday dress and with Sunday manners. They doubtless do not mean to deceive each other, but there is little to draw out the real self. There is nothing to disturb or irritate, nothing to prove the honesty, the neatness, the industry, the persistence, the business ability; nothing to disclose the true ideas in matters of serious import, of health, religion, duties of husbands and wives, the government of the home; and too often the intimacy of marriage discloses many personal peculiarities of temper, habits and manners that, if seen in time, would have prevented marriage. The trouble does not originate with young people themselves, but with older people; but as the young people of to-day will be the older people of the future, it would be well for them to realize what the trouble is. The fact is, that in the present conditions of society the association of young people is unnatural. From earliest childhood boys and girls are taught to think of each other only in sentimental ways. The little boys and girls in school are playing at "lovering," and their conversation is often more about beaus and sweethearts than about the plays of childhood, which alone should occupy their thoughts. You remember that little miss of ten who asked you, when you were sixteen, who was your beau. You recall her look of surprise when you replied that you had none, and her exclamation, "Have no beau! Why, how do you get along without one?" What made such a mere child imagine a beau to be an essential agent of a girl's life? Because she had been taught by the jests and suggestions of her elders that every boy was a possible lover, and, young as she was, that thought was woven into her very life. It is pitiable to see how early the mind of the child is tainted by sentimentality, by the unwise suggestions of older friends. I remember hearing of a child of six who was talking of getting married. Some one said, "You are too little to think of getting married," and the child replied, "Why, I have thought of it since I was two years old." And doubtless she had, because it had been continually impressed on her mind by the conversation of parents and friends, and the direction they had given her thought in regard to her relation to everything masculine.