Girls brought up in wealthy homes are seldom seen out of doors, but poorer children, at a very early age, have to do something to help to earn their living. They gather firing; they nurse the baby; they cook and sew; they learn to scrape the soot from the bottom of the family rice pot with a hoe; and, in some places, they very early begin to carry loads, slung from a pole on their shoulders. Some sit beside their mothers and help to make paper money to be offered to idols. Some paste rags on a board, one on the top of the other, to be afterwards made into soles for shoes; or they weave coloured tape, or twist fibre into rough string. In some parts of China they make embroidery, working beautiful birds and flowers with their clever fingers. All Chinese girls learn to embroider and make up their own shoes and the embroidered bands which they wear round their distorted ankles. Sometimes they feed silk-worms with mulberry leaves, and afterwards wind the threads off the cocoons which the worms have spun. When a little older some girls may be seen making silver ornaments for women’s hair-pins, but this is work usually done by men and boys; sometimes poor girls, while they are quite young, sell cakes and sweets in the streets, to help their parents; often they spin cotton and weave it into cloth, to make clothes for all the family. With the exception of a very few daughters of scholars, who were taught to read and write by their fathers, girls used never to be troubled with learning. In spite of this, there are books giving the names of wise and learned women, some of whom, especially in the time of the T’ang Dynasty, wrote famous poems. This shows that ages ago women in China were educated, but as a rule in later days they were left untaught, to learn by slow degrees the ‘three dependencies of woman,’ “who,” as the Chinese say, “depends upon her father when she is young, on her husband when she is older, and upon her son when she is very old.” The story is told of a girl, who used to sing as she toiled at her daily tasks: “Oh, the tea-cup, the tea-cup, the beautiful, beautiful tea-cup”--that was all the song she knew! When Christianity comes, it brings new hope and new songs, and teaches girls and boys alike to know of God and Heaven and a life away beyond the narrow courts of the houses in which the earthly lives of so many Chinese girls are shut up.