I knew five sisters once very intimately. They had a bad father whom they never saw—though he was living—after the eldest of the five was about twelve, and their mother was very poor. But they clung together and shared the daily labour—pleasure they knew little of—and when two families of richer relatives had become poor, and the members separated, disunion having partly ruined them, the sisters still held a brave and respectable front to the world, being able to do this because they kept together, serving their mother’s God and having a common faith and practice. “Did none of them marry?” I fancy some of you asking mentally. Yes, two have now good husbands and pleasant homes; and God comforts and strengthens the other three in His own way which is always for the best. (_To be continued._) VARIETIES. THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN. Few in the present generation know how very modern the real education of women is. Dr. More, in the middle of last century, was frightened at his daughter Hannah’s cleverness, and made her leave off the study of Latin and mathematics. Mrs. Somerville, who was born in 1780, says that when she was getting on with mathematics her father, Admiral Fairfax, said to her mother, “We must put a stop to this or we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days.” When Hannah More and her friend, Miss Harrison, began teaching poor girls in barns and brick kitchens, they were told they would ruin agriculture, that if servants learned to read they would read their mistresses’ letters, and if they learned to write they would forge their mistresses’ names. IN A YOUNG LADY’S ALBUM. The American author, James Russell Lowell, had as happy a knack as has ever been known of writing album verses. When he was in this country, Professor Max Müller’s daughter, Beatrice, asked him to give her a few lines, and this is what he wrote— “O’er the wet sands an insect crept, Ages ere man on earth was known, And patient Time, while Nature slept, The slender tracing turned to stone. ’Twas the first autograph; and ours? Prithee, how much of prose or song, In league with the creative powers, Shall ’scape Oblivion’s broom so long?” RICHES.—Virtue is the best riches; knowledge the next, and what are usually called riches the worst. THE RIGHT RENDERING. The following incident is recorded by the Bishop of Durham: Archbishop Whately, in his last illness, begged a friend to read to him St. Paul’s description of the Christian’s hope as he looks “for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change” (so the friend read from the Authorised Version) “our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body.” “No, no,” interrupted the Archbishop, “give his own words! He never called God’s works vile!” And so we now read in the Revised Version, “Who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of His glory?”