a walk though you feel lazy. Finish some drawing or needlework, which you would rather leave to begin something else. Make yourself do something which you do not like, and which is useful.

And I say to all of you, not only to the leaving ones: Do not lounge through the day just because it is holidays. You are not a little child who has to be made to do things: you are a sensible, reasonable being, who wants to grow. You do not leave off eating for a month, you do not leave off growing for a month; then do not leave off growing in other ways. Do not be worthless at any time.

Some of you seem to think you will not have to give account of holidays to God-I think you will be more called to account for them, for then you have a chance of showing your real stuff.

And when you are grown up, and quite free, feel that you are still more responsible.

Enjoy yourself to the top of your bent, but see that each day you gain new power to do what you ought, and what you make up your mind to do; and remember that this power is only gained in the using and dies out if we do not use it. I shall be horribly disappointed if you do not gain this power, and if you do not use it well, "to the Glory of God and the Relief of Man's Estate."

Be ambitious--be all you were meant to be; make the world different; be generous-freely you have received, freely give.

Some one said to me the other day, "Girls are younger nowadays, and they go on being young till they are well through middle life. At sixteen we had to look after other people, but they shirk responsibility, till women of thirty are content to be like birds of the air, just amusing themselves, and feeling no call to be of any serious use."

I said, "Well, I do not like to see even a girl of eighteen with no raison d'être, living like a prize animal!""

Why were you born? God thought about you, and took trouble about you, and has something you can do for Him. To exist beautifully is not enough! Have you definite duties, which you stick to even though they bore you, e.g., house duties, or reading aloud, or lessons with the younger ones? If not, find some!

Marcus Aurelius counted each day lost in which he could not at night look back on something he had done for others.

Jeremy Taylor, in the "Golden Grove," says :Suppose every day to be a day of business: for your whole life is a race and a battle; a merchandise, a journey. Every day propounds to yourself a rosary or chaplet of works, to present to God at night."

I have given you three pieces of advice

I.-Vote on the right side in conversation.
II.--Show that you love your mother.
III.-Put salt into every day.

I would end with one more. I take it from Saint Simon, that clever on-looker at the Court of Louis XIV. whose memoirs are famous. His morning greeting to himself was—

"Get up, M. le Comte! you have great things to do to-day."

You will all of you go out to lives that you can make empty and self-indulgent and narrow if you like; you can shirk duties and eat capriciously or intemperately, and lie in bed too long; you can idle about all day amusing yourself, and fill your mind with dress and gossip and spite;-perhaps you would feel there was 66 no harm" in such a life!

No harm! I would rather hear you were dead than that you lived a life like that!

On the other hand, every day of your life you can make the wings of your soul grow by an honest bit of self-denial, by an honest bit of work for others, by an honest bit of mental work.

Every day you can be more worth having; there is not one of you here who has not the power to make herself and to pray herself-into a noble, dutiful woman.

"Get up, M. le Comte! you have great things to do to-day."

A Friday Lesson.

UR course of lessons for this term brings us

to-day to Jephthah's story; to decide on the amount of blame due to the father is not a matter which so nearly concerns us as to learn the lesson of true womanhood taught us by the daughter. Hers was no blind obedience; her reason for sacrificing herself gives us the true position of a woman as a helpmeet, and as a helpmeet in the performance of public duty. "If thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord"-her father must do his duty at all costs, and she will help him to do it, even at the cost of her own life. The place of every woman is to make duty possible and imperative for those about her-for brother, sister, husband, friend. How many women keep their menkind back from public duty by their fretfulness about the inconveniences entailed on themselves? A clergyman or doctor has to face fatigue or infection, a citizen wishes to vote according to his conscience and against his interest: how often a woman-wife, sister, or mother-puts expediency

before him, persuades him that "second best' will do," instead of aiming at "one equal temper of heroic hearts."

Besides the love of her country and the sense of public duty, which shine out in Jephthah's daughter, notice the plain lesson of simple obedience, "That she subdued her to her Father's will."

The ideal of obedience is less thought of now than in the "Ages of Faith,"—perhaps, in one way, this is only a right development; but, though obedience is a "young" stage of moral growth, it is a necessary one,-mankind went through it, and each man or woman worth the name must go through it even as our Lord Himself did. I recognize the strength, the North-country virtue of "grit" in such independence and sturdiness as that of the Yorkes in "Shirley," but the willing and reasonable obedience of a strong nature seems to me still higher-it is a nobler attitude of mind to feel, "I don't care whether I get my own way in this or that, or am my own master; I want to be in touch with the larger, higher life around me," that larger life of moral growth into which only a humble, teachable nature can enter. The larger, stronger nature-the big dog-yields gladly to its master; the small terrier nature loves to find an opportunity to yap and snarl. There is nothing fine about the unreasoning instinct to resent an order-it is rather the sign of a small