well, I should have very little time to give to study and the quiet rest which is so refreshing after the day’s work.” The details of No. 4’s expenditure are given later on. No. 3 and No. 4 were both considerably older than No. 1 and No. 2, and had both learnt that the one absolutely necessary indulgence for a high school mistress is a good holiday in new scenes. No. 4 says in a note that the cost of her holidays during this year were lower than usual, as she did not go abroad. No. 2 strikes the usual note of warning on this point:-- “I spent very little in my holidays; for my father was much averse to his only daughter spending any of her free time away from home; but you will also notice that there is a distinctly large proportion of my salary unappropriated or reserved, and a certain proportion of this ought to have been spent in holidays. I enjoy excellent health usually, and my nerves seem the only vulnerable point, but after teaching more than three years at W----, a term in X---- brought me to the brink of a regular nervous breakdown: this I imagine might have been avoided if I had really had a good holiday every year.” The moral of this to young teachers would seem to be: Do not try to save out of £100 a year at the expense of your health. Better keep fresh and strong without saving and rise to £120 as quickly as possible, than break down and exhaust your savings in a long illness which may reduce your salary to £90. The conditions and cost of living of women clerks vary in many and important respects from those of women teachers. Their work is less exhausting on the whole and less trying to the nerves. But, on the other hand, their holidays are generally very short; except for a few brief months in the year, they must work while it is day, and seek for their amusements when the night comes; they are doing sedentary work in office hours, and yet only by a strong determination can they find any recreation except in the further sedentary occupations of reading and sewing, or in poisonous lecture halls, concert rooms, or theatres. They cannot easily do their shopping, and have no opportunity of wearing out their shabby dresses in private; they must feed themselves unwholesomely at tea-rooms, or extravagantly and monotonously at restaurants. Above all, whereas teaching may be regarded as a life work well worth the doing for its own sake, clerical work can hardly be soul-satisfying to any intelligent human being. It is not living, but merely a means of living.