There is a certain risk at the outset of these studies that girls will take the pose of philosophical students, and talk logic and metaphysics, to the confusion of their friends and of their own feelings later on, when they come to years of discretion and realize the absurdity of these "lively sallies," as they would have been called in early Victorian times--the name alone might serve as a warning to the incautious! They may perhaps go through an argumentative period and trample severely upon the opinions of those who are not ready to have their majors "distinguished" and their minors "conceded," and, especially, their conclusions denied. But these phases will be outlived and the hot-and-cold remembrance of them will be sufficient expiation, with the realization that they did not know much when they had taken in the "beggarly elements" which dazzled them for a moment. The more thoughtful minds will escape the painful phase altogether. There are three special classes among girls whose difficulties of mind call for attention. There are those who frisk playfully along, taking the good things of life as they come--"the more the better"--whom, as children, it is hard to call to account. They are lightly impressed and only for a moment by the things they feel, and scarcely moved at all by the things they understand. The only side which seems troublesome in their early life is that there is so little hold upon it. They are unembarrassed and quite candid about their choice; it is the enjoyable good, life on its pleasantest side. And this disposition is in the mind as well as in the will; they cannot see it in any other way. Restraint galls them, and their inclination is not to resist but to evade it. These are kitten-like children in the beginning, and they appear charming. But when the kitten in them is overgrown, its playful evasiveness takes an ugly contour and shows itself as want of principle. The tendency to snatch at enjoyment hardens into a grasping sense of market values, and conscience, instead of growing inexorable, learns to be pliant to circumstances. Debts weigh lightly, and duties scarcely weigh at all. Concealment and un-truthfulness come in very easily to save the situation in a difficulty, and once the conduct of life is on the down-grade it slides quickly and far, for the sense of responsibility is lacking and these natures own no bond of obligation. They have their touch of piety in childhood, but it soon wears off, and in its best days cannot stand the demands made upon it by duty; it fails of its hold upon the soul, like a religion without a sacrifice. In these minds some notions of ethics leave a barbed arrow of remorse which penetrates further than piety. They may soothe themselves with the thought that God will easily forgive, later on, but they cannot quite lose consciousness of the law which does not forgive, of the responsibility of human acts and the inevitable punishment of