taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as combined in due degree with desire and anticipation. The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness, apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would have been both. There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of them? A knowledge of what people call “common things”—of the elements of physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most economical and most beneficial way of applying both,—these should form a part of the system of every girls’ school—whether for the higher or the lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and attending Faraday’s lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of her husband’s wages through want of management. In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my nature was exhausted in airy visions! As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,—except those which I made myself,—no caged birds nor tormented kittens. [Illustration]