At least one means of learning something of housekeeping lies open to every creature. That means is an observing interest. We never remain entirely ignorant of the things in which we are interested. We gather ideas about them everywhere, and in the most unexpected and unintentional places. If we sit at tables where the meals are carefully served and well cooked, that privilege teaches many things about serving and cooking. There is as much to learn in a cheap restaurant, if we watch how things are done, and think out the reason for the methods. If we watch a servant or a housewife doing work well, we need never again be entirely ignorant of how to do that work. If we read a book or hear a lecture, or overhear a scrap of talk in a street car which contains a thought to help us or an unusual method to be tried, it ought to stick to our memories as if magnetized. Think in the morning that you want to know something about the cats in Thibet, and almost surely before night, you will have heard or read something about them. We know how often this is true of remote and unusual affairs; it is infinitely more true of intimate daily ones. It is a great blessing; a means of getting knowledge without other struggle than remembering what we want to know. If it is not a royal road, it is at least a royal by-path, to learning. Some day, you will discover that you are "grown up," and if you have learned what you could and helped when you could, you will discover, too, that you have the gift and power to make a home--that you are a woman, who is not a stone but a hearth. PART III MY HERITAGE I MY HERITAGE "The lot has fallen unto me in a fair ground, yea, I have a goodly heritage." THERE is a deep surprise and joy in these words, which grows to exultation. They might have been spoken by one who had climbed a height to look for the first time on the place where henceforth his life and work were to be, and saw in the curve of many-folded, blue hills, white roads with crops warming in the fields on either hand, woods and streams, laden orchards, and vines in garlands. "It is a fair ground." Then--"yea, I have a goodly heritage." There is joy in beauty, and in possession--and more than that. There is exultation in the vision of seed-time and harvest, of growing beauty and usefulness, of life renewed; and in the strength and power to work for all this and to achieve it. It is not fanciful to say that a woman may regard her heritage in some such way as this. The childhood, and the homes of the world are hers, and her work is the making of men and women. If she chooses to say that God has exalted His handmaiden, who is able to deny it?