“It is very kind of you and your husband to wish to help Jessie,” she said; “but then, if you are willing to sacrifice yourselves in this direction, it must really be yourselves whom you do sacrifice, and not other people, whom you mislead into being sacrificed blindfold. Our sacrifices must be costly to ourselves and not to others. If poor Jessie is really, as you seem to say, the irresponsible victim of her vice, just as if it was a disease, it would be truer kindness on your part to sacrifice your pride for her real good. You are only giving her freedom to do some great harm to other people, even if you feel it right to endure such an example as hers among your own children. But I do not think you need let her go to the workhouse. I believe there are people willing and able to undertake the care and cure of such cases. If you like, I will write to some of these. But meantime, as you helped Jessie to get into my house, I must really ask you to take her away with you at once.” “Oh, yes, that’s the way burdens are always thrown back on poor folk!” muttered the woman. “I am throwing no burden on you,” said Lucy, with a firmness which surprised herself. “I am simply handing back a great risk which you deceitfully imposed upon me. I think we have nothing more to discuss,” and thereupon she rang the kitchen bell, and summoned Jessie into the presence of her mistress and her cousin. (_To be continued._) A HAPPY HEALTHY GIRLHOOD. BY “MEDICUS” (DR. GORDON-STABLES, R.N.). PART II. “’Tis now the summer of your youth; Time has not cropt the roses from your cheek, Though sorrow may have washed them.” _Moore._ The rose is a sweetly beautiful flower, and no matter where it grows it somehow always charms the human eye, always appeals to the human heart. Lovely it is in the garden, especially perhaps at early morning when gemmed by dew, the crystalline tears left by the dying night, or at eventide, when the colour in a rose-garden seems to reflect the tints of the sunset clouds. Roses of all classes and kinds are lovely, grow they where they may, on castle lawn or draping the walls of the humblest cottage. And just as sweet and tender are those lovely buds and blossoms of the crimson _rosa canina_ that bedeck and mantle our hedges in the month of June. Children are ofttimes comparable to roses—girl-children I mean—mere opening buds, and they ought to be none the less beautiful and innocent-looking when older, but still in their teens. Ah, those “teens,” would we not all prefer to remain that age and never to grow older! I suppose angels are all and always in their teens, and the saints in Heaven too! But descending from romance, with which a medical man ought to have nothing to do, the stern reality, life, to a girl in her teens is often a trying time. This, for many reasons which I shall now briefly consider and advise upon.