Civilization (by which I mean Christianity’s effect on the brains and hands of humanity), wonderfully develops and differentiates our powers. Among the Modocs there are but four specialties—assigned with remarkable fairness, in the proportion of two for the squaws and two for the braves. The last hunt and fight; the first do the drudgery and bring up the pappooses. Among the Parisians, on the contrary, the division of labor is almost infinite, so that the hand perfectly skilled in the most minute industry (as, for instance, in moulding the shoestrings of a porcelain statuette), needs no other resource to gain a comfortable livelihood. Among the Modocs, skins are about the only article of commerce. Among the Parisians, evolution has gone so far in the direction of separating employments formerly blended, that you can not buy cream and milk in the same shop. By some unaccountable perversion of good sense, the specialties of human beings who are women, have been strangely circumscribed. But they were _there_, all the same, and now, under the genial sun of a more enlightened era, they are coming airily forth, like singing birds after a thunder storm. And wonderfully do they help some of us to solve the toughest of all problems: _What is life for?_ Let us see. Lift the cover of your sewing basket; there are thimble, scissors, spools of thread, and all the neat outfit needful to a seamstress, but minus the needle they have no explanation and no efficiency. Unlock your writing desk: what are paper, ink, and sealing-wax, without the pen? They are nothing but waste material and toys. So it is with you and me. We have no explanation that is adequate; we have no place in the work-box and portfolio of to-day; no place in the great humming hive of the land we live in, save as some predominating aptitude in each of us explains why we are here, and in what way we are to swell the inspiring song of voluntary toil and beneficent success. Suppose that here, and now, you proceed to take an “inventory of stock,” if you have not been thoughtful enough to do that already. Made up as you are, what is your _forte_, your “specialty,” your “best hold,” as men phrase it? Be sure of one thing, at the outset: The great Artificer, in putting together your individual nature, did not forget this crowning gift, any more than he forgets to add its own peculiar fragrance to the arbutus, or its own song to the lark. It may not lie upon the surface, this choicest of your treasures; diamonds seldom do. Miners lift a great deal of mere dust, before the sparkling jewel they are seeking gladdens the eye. Genius has been often and variously defined. I would call it _an intuition_ of one’s own best gift. Rosa Bonheur knew hers; Charlotte Cushman recognized hers; George Eliot was not greatly at a loss concerning hers. As for us, of less emphatic individuality, sometimes we wait until a friend’s hand leads us up before the mirror of our potential