The true way to study about islands and capes and all the other divisions of land and water is to have some sand and water in a box, and then to build up the sand into miniature islands and capes, just like the real things out-of-doors. When I went to school, all the boys could say, “An island is a portion of land entirely surrounded by water,” and yet not a boy in the class knew that he lived on an island. So it is with sewing. The girls I knew years ago cried so hard over the long, dreary seams, that I used to be glad I was not a girl. But nowadays there is sewing without weeping: a neat box all ready for school,—with thimbles, needles, pins, thread, scissors; hundreds of pieces of cloth, basted and ready to be stitched; no dreary seams to tire young fingers, but easy graded lessons, like a needle-work kindergarten. And as we crossed the exhibition-hall, we saw another method. There on a long table were hundreds of garments and parts of garments made by the public-school girls of Philadelphia. There, in a frame, were all the lessons arranged in regular order, showing every step—hemming, over-seaming, back-stitching and running, reversible seam, felling, gathering, darning, and mending, up to the fine art of button-hole making. The girls are from eight to fifteen years of age, and that work they did in school, while attending to their regular school lessons. We passed on to the tables where the work of school-girls of Boston and New Haven and Hoboken was shown; and in every instance, we saw regular, graded lessons in needle-work, from the plainest hemming up to the finest embroidery. New York girls, too, in the schools of the Children’s Aid Society, in mission and church schools, showed by their samples that they also were students of stitchery. I saw one piece of sewing that seemed truly wonderful. It was in a glass case, and it was the “graduation exercises” of a young girl, fourteen years of age, on leaving Fräulein Calm’s school in Cassel, Germany. It consisted of half a yard of muslin ornamented with every kind of sewing that can be done on a machine; half a yard of dress fabric worked up by hand into the most beautiful pleatings, in a style that would bring tears of joy to the manly eyes of a ladies’ tailor; a piece of wonderful patching; and a square of darning so perfect that it was impossible to tell which was the new cloth, and which the old garment. Why, the girl must have been a finished dress-maker! She could earn good wages to-morrow by simply showing her “graduation exercise.” And as we turned to a dozen other exhibits in the hall, we saw more sewing, from the work of the first class in hemming up to that of the little dress-makers, who could cut, fit, and make their own clothes.