_Adolescence._—It is the habit of age to call youth the golden era, to speak of that period as the halcyon days of life, and to look back over its tempestuous beauty with eyes misted by years and longing. It is one of man’s most regrettable traits that he is ceaselessly yearning back toward the past. For the few brief years of childhood, he is content in the present, and looks, if he looks at all, toward the beckoning doorway of the future. Once he has reached that threshold, he commences the endless looking back, until we have a race of Lot’s wives whose souls, at least, are static from backward glances. This is particularly true of women, though it applies in general to the whole race. The child with her dolls is happy, and in her play looks toward the future when she will be a grown woman. Every girl who mothers her dolls has a yearning toward motherhood, but let the period for that estate arrive, and she looks back tearfully on her carefree childhood. Once the girl has stepped, irrevocably, into the narrow pathway of adolescence that leads to the opening door of maturity, she commences looking back. The adolescent girl pins up her hair, or bobs it, today, and gazes regretfully at the curls of childhood. She packs away her dolls, and passes the closet where they are sleeping with a sigh. The widespread fad of fancy dolls that has swept the country during the past few years has a double significance. Largely, it points toward starved motherhood. It is the irrefutable sign that there are thousands of women who long for children, but who, for various reasons, deny that urge. It points to something else, too. It is the answer to that harking back to childhood, when dolls were the only children, and all the world was play. This is regrettable. Looking back to the past is a deadening pastime. No one period of life should be more delightful than another. The rounded person lives fully in the present, and looks toward the future happily, with no yearnings toward the past. The chief reason why people look back, rather than forward is that, through faulty education, unfortunate miscomprehension, they spoil the present and see no hope for doing otherwise with the future. If we study the matter sensibly, we will see that we do not actually want to go back to the past for its actual activities; what we want is the happy carefree life we then enjoyed. But, if people lived rightly and thought correctly, they would not want to go back from a state of comparative freedom to a period of supervision. No normal, healthy adult wants to go back to a period wherein all of his thinking is done for him. It is merely an effort to dodge the cares of life. But, if our lives are properly regulated, and if we are properly educated, our cares will not hamper us, and gathering years will increase rather than decrease our enjoyment of living.