But between childhood and youth there comes a trying period when the child has become well cognizant of the practical world, but has as yet no hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen, for instance, one has the world pretty well charted, but not yet has the slow chemistry of time transmuted this experience into meanings and values. There is a crassness and materiality about the following three or four years that have no counterpart until youth is over and the sleek years of the forties have begun. How cocksure and familiar with the world is the boy or girl at this age! They have no doubts, but they have no glow. At no time in life is one so unspiritual, so merely animal, so much of the earth, earthy. How different is it to be a few years later! How shaken and adventurous will the world appear then! For this waiting period of life, the virtues are harder to discover. Curiosity has lapsed, for there do not seem to be many things left to be curious about. The child is beautifully unconscious of his own ignorance. Similarly has the play activity diminished; the boy has put away his Indian costumes, and the girl her dolls. At this season of life the virtue would seem to consist in the acquirement of some skill in some art or handicraft or technique. This is the time to search for the budding talents and the strong native bents and inclinations. To be interesting is one of the best of virtues, and few things make a person more interesting than skill or talent. From a selfish point of view, too, all who have grown up with unskillful hands will realize the solid virtue of knowing how to do something with the hands, and avoid that vague restlessness and desire to get at grips with something that haunts the professional man who has neglected in youth to cultivate this virtue of technique. And it is a virtue which, if not acquired at that time, can never be acquired. The deftness of hand, alertness of mind, are soon lost if they are not taken advantage of, and the child grows up helpless and unskillful, with a restless void where a talent and interest should be.