Turn your attention to the tasks that burden you heavily. Here reforms are needed most. You will hardly be ready to assert that you are doing these tasks in the very best way in the world. Find out why not, and then try to improve on the old method. After you have thought over your work in general sit down some evening and plan out the duties of the next day as far as you know them. Forget how you used to manage. Maybe you will be able to make only one or two small changes the first time. That is a good beginning. Try again later. Keep your wits about you and your thinking-cap on all the time. It will pay. As the world grows older it accomplishes more in a given time than it used to do. They can make a hundred things now in the time it took to make one fifty years ago. Are you a part of the world and its progress or are you something left behind in the onward march? Not your fault? Well, you can be pretty sure that it is _partly_ your fault and that you can remedy some of it if you only will. * * * * * _FREE SUBSCRIPTION_ _Besides the prize for the best story of “heroism at home,” every month another free year’s subscription will be given for the best item or paragraph of any kind for the Department. The two subscriptions will not be given to the same person. The subscription may begin with any number you please._ * * * * * Someone says that the world’s progress doesn’t concern her off in her little corner—that she has her work to do and that’s all there is to it. Well, perhaps it doesn’t in one way of speaking, but her life is both less happy and less useful than if she let the world’s progress concern her a little. She says it wouldn’t help her any in making biscuit or sweeping the floor if she did know some of the stories of history, how the revolution in Russia is getting on, about the great writers and painters, about anything outside her work. Well, it wouldn’t—in a way. The biscuits wouldn’t be any better nor the floor any cleaner. But any one that isn’t half-witted can learn to sweep a floor or even to bake biscuits. You are, or ought to be, more than a cook and a housemaid. You are a _home-maker_, and though good biscuits and clean floors are very necessary things in any house, they are _not_ enough to make a _home_ out of it. In a true _home_ there must be mental and moral, as well as physical, comfort. You are still something more. You are a woman and a free human being. You have your duties to other people, as everyone has, but, like everyone, you have a duty to _yourself_. You were given a brain and a soul, as well as a body. You can easily see the need of feeding your body: the need of feeding your brain and soul are equally necessary. Why were they given to you? To starve?