The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of æsthetics, giving her mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant creature fore-going an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality. It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of lightening the labour of that mill-round by doing their own natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought to do. They will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers, what not; but they will not learn cooking, and they will not keep their own houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between the interests and the sympathies of the sexes coincident with the endeavour, on the one side, to approximate their pursuits. A great demand is being made now for more work for woman and wider fields for her labour. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to her hand at home; and we hold that she ought to perfectly perform the duties which we may call instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote from her natural condition. Much of this demand springs from restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher aspirations or nobler energies unused. Indeed, the nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old George Herbert's well-worn line; and the less she will feel herself above that work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances to the level of their thoughts; only the poor in spirit who cannot enrich their deeds by their motives.