and so virtuous, slander might wound but not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of husband, could but transport to the bosom of her God." Andrew Jackson was never the same man again. During his presidency he never used the phrase, "By the Eternal," nor any other language which could be considered profane. He mourned his wife until he himself rejoined her in the tomb he had prepared for them both. Of all the blessed things below To hint the joys above, There is not one our hearts may know So dear as mated love. It walks the garden of the Lord, It gives itself away; To give, and think not of reward, Is glory day by day. And though sometimes the shadows fall, And day is dark as night, It bows and drinks the cup of gall, But gives not up the fight. For One is in the union where Whose presence keeps it brave and fair, XLIX. DISCONTENTED GIRLS, ONE PANACEA FOR THEM-AND ONE REFUGE. OT every girl is discontented, nor are any wretched all the time. If they were, our homes would lose much sunshine. Certainly no class in the community is so constantly written about, talked at, and preached to as our girls. And still there always seems to be room left for one word more. I am persuaded that the leaven of discontent pervades girls of the several social ranks, from the fair daughter of a cultured home to her who has grown up in a crowded tenement, her highest ambition to dress like the young ladies she sees on the fashionable avenue. City girls and country girls alike know the meaning of this discontent, which sometimes amounts to morbidness, and again only to nervous irritability. I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading novels, whilst her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter. "Do, ma, keep still," she would say, with amiable wonder at ma's notable ways. This incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have often queried, in the twenty years which have passed since I saw her, what sort of woman she made. As a girl she was vexatious, though no ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls. She had no aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify. It is not so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality— the girls, for instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were babies. Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions. "To what end," says the former, "have I studied hard, and widened my resources? I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short." I am quoting from what girls have said to me-girls who have been graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any paid work. Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and be young women of elegant leisure? If love, and love's climax, the wedding march, follow soon upon a girl's leaving school, she is taken out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman's highest vocation, queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life and its peril of ennui and unhappiness together. This, however, is the fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do, to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain. Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard it in that superstitious light. No amount of school training, dissevered from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift any body, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe living in this shadowy world. I have no doubt that there are numbers of girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas! subjects of secret, deprecating scorn. A girl has, indeed, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents, or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the background while she shines in the front. I did not write this article for the purpose of saying what I hold to be the bounden duty of every father and mother in the land; viz., to educate the daughter as they educate the son, to some practical, bread-winning pursuit. That should be the rule, and not the exception. A girl should be trained so that with either head or hands, as artist or artisan, in some way or other, she will be able to go into the world's market with something for which the world, being shrewd and knowing what it wants, will pay in cash. Rich or poor, the American father who fails to give his daughter this special training is a short-sighted and cruel man. My thought was rather of the girls themselves. Some of them will read this. So will some of their mothers. Mothers and daughters often, not invariably, are so truly en rapport that their mutual comprehension is without a flaw. There are homes in which, with the profoundest regard and the truest tenderness on both sides, they do not understand each other. The mother either sees the daughter's discontent, recognizes and resents it, or fails to see it, would laugh at its possibility, and pity the sentimentalist who imagined it. And there are dear, blooming, merry-hearted, clear-eyed young women who are as gay and as elastic as bird on bough or flower in field. To discontented girls I would say, there is for you one panacea-Work; and there is one refuge-Christ. Have you been told this before? Do you say that you can find no work worth the doing? Believe me, if not in your own. home, you need go no further than your own set, your own street, your own town, to discover it waiting for you. No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. The girl can not be unhappy who, without reserve and with full surrender, consecrates herself to Christ, for then will she have work enough.-MARGARET E. SANGSTER. God giveth his beloved rest through action But condemnation and the sense of dearth. And shall the dream of life, the quenchless yearning Labor puts on the livery of greatness, And in its triumph takes no note of lateness, |