Through most of our teens, school is the principal thing. Whether we are interested in it or not, it is then our recognized occupation. Nowadays, there are opportunities in many schools to learn things helpful in housekeeping. They are not only to be found in cooking and sewing classes. Chemistry and physics, which may one or other of them be required of you for college entrance examinations, are also of excellent service in housekeeping. Some of you will be in schools where you can choose to some extent what courses you take. In that case, do not say chemistry is "messy," and physics is "too hard," but just tussle with them for the sake of your home-making, as a boy would who knew he was to be a physician or an engineer. I hardly dare to mention it, but detested arithmetic, learned in school, often afterward saves the peace of a household and the happiness of the housekeeper. Personally, I have found what geometry I know useful on many unexpected occasions. But to turn to a more agreeable subject, I can recommend any course in light carpentry, for you will almost surely like it if you try it, and no one thing is more useful in a house--except perhaps, arithmetic. If, on the contrary, you are in a school where there are no choices, or if you are obliged to narrow down to the requirements of a college entrance examination, the only thing to do is to keep in mind the things which will be especially useful to you--physical sciences, mathematics, manual training, domestic science; study some of them if you can, and, besides that, see what you can learn at home. I do not mean that the other things which you study at school are not useful in home-making; they are. It is just that certain things are part of the special training for this work, and those named above are the ones more usually taught in schools. We turn now to the preparation which can be given to us, and which we give ourselves, at home. Ideally, this is the place to learn home-making. If we have a home, whether it is a palace or a room in a tenement, some one in it "keeps house." If that person is one's mother, then is one the normal and fortunate person who learns in the normal and fortunate way, from being with her. If she does some of the work of the house herself, and we help her, we learn far more than we realize until some moment of emergency comes and we find that our eyes, and hands, and noses, and muscles are trained for service.