Especially would I urge women to pursue intellectual pleasures rather than those of the emotions, to which they are now largely confined. Some of the most promising marriages fail through lack of intellectual sympathy in the wife. How sad it is to read these words of John Stuart Mill in his essay on the liberty of women,――“Young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as soon as they marry;” a result which he attributes directly to the absence of sympathy in their wives for that which constitutes the highest culture, and often a direct opposition to it. His opinion is valid everywhere, though it should be true nowhere. For the sake of her husband and her children, she should resolutely turn to the cultivation of her mind as one of the firmest holds on their affections. One of the simplest forms of intellectual pleasure is that which is derived from riddles, puzzles, conundrums, and rebuses. Children and primitive nations are especially captivated by these agreeable stimulants to their ingenuity. In French country towns they are highly popular, and many of the cafés have _cercles_ who meet nightly to solve the enigmas proposed in the weekly papers and forward the solutions to the editor. Those which are successful receive a small prize or an honorable mention. The placid bourgeois appear to derive extraordinary enjoyment from this pastime. Most people understand “cultivating the intellect” to mean reading. Sometimes it has this result, but generally it is too desultory, miscellaneous, and aimless. Were it directed to a more definite purpose it could be made to yield more profit and more enjoyment. I do not mean to the purpose of instruction, as probably the reader has been in haste to suppose, but so as to endow the mind with a wider range of interests and thus with more sources of pleasure. Read what interests you and interest yourself in what you read――that is the best rule. I have a small opinion of lists of the “hundred best books,” or courses of reading cut and dried for you by large societies. They may instruct, as do lessons appointed by a master; but I am speaking of reading for pleasure; and really that is the only kind worth mentioning. I have always liked reading, but I never could bear to lay out a course for myself, still less follow any proposed by another.