the number of things that cultivated people of society care for and appreciate, they learnt a good deal of humility. Certainly the more I read on general subjects the more I feel my own ignorance, and I think it would be very odd if it did not have the same effect on you.

The next reason for this sort of lesson, and one of the best, is that it ought to raise our taste. It is not enough to like or dislike a book: we ought to train ourselves to like the best books. We do not think ourselves born judges in music or art; we submit to being trained before we think our opinion worth giving. It would be just so with a book, but you often hear girls quite sorry for the author if they find a book dull; they feel he is to blame! When I find an author dull, whom good critics admire, I feel pretty sure that I am deficient on that point, and I try to learn to see in him what they do. I speak from experience; when I found Wordsworth dull, I knew it was my own fault, and I read and re-read him, and listened to those who could appreciate him, and now I am rewarded by his being a real part of the pleasures of my life. We need not leave off liking the merely pretty writers, such as Miss Procter and Longfellow. I love Longfellow and admire Miss Procter, but I cared for them both quite as much when I was seven, and an author who can be in some measure appreciated at seven ought to give

way to deeper authors by-and-by. Like Guinevere, it is our duty "to love the highest." The great good of cultivated homes is that we learn to "put away childish things" and to admire the better things which we hear talked of. Some of you may not have this advantage; your people may be too busy for talking about books and such things, and some of you may be cut off from interesting talks by having school lessons to prepare when you would like to listen. Therefore, I should like you to get some talk in school on such subjects-to spend some "Half-hours with the best Authors."

“W

Holidays.

THERE shall we spend the holidays?" has doubtless been discussed in many households, by both parents and children,-I wonder if the children followed it up by a still more important question, "How shall I spend the holidays?" Just at the close of a term you will not want me to suggest anything that is like lessons, but at the same time I do not see why you should spend seven weeks in idleness and novel-reading, any more than you would live for seven weeks on puddings and sweets. You like plenty of sweets, and I hope you will get them, but I hope you will have meat as well!

There are many books which are not novels, and which you would yet enjoy,-books which would send you back more thoughtful; and though you might not know any one lesson better next term because of having read them, yet you would be a step nearer to being the sort of women you would like to be. I dare say when you go for your holiday you will get something to read at the station

bookstall.

Now, several of the books I mean can be got there, as easily as yellow novels, and can be got for the price of Punch; they are so small you could have them in your pocket and get them read in odds and ends of time, out-of-doors, so that you need not miss any expedition, or any fresh air, through staying in the house to study. In the same way you could get some really good poem for a penny, and learn it by heart. Nothing would please me so much as if you all brought me next term the name of some book you had read, of this kind, and repeated to me a poem of the sort that you think I should like-which very likely is not the sort you like, as yet. It would do you good, whether you enjoyed it or not, for you would be teaching yourselves to like the better kind of books if you persevered with it, and your holidays would be pleasanter, as well as better, if there was some effort of this kind to give backbone to each day. Cooks say there should be a pinch of salt in everything you eat, and I am sure we ought to have a pinch of the moral salt of self-conquest in each day, just to keep it sweet and good.

Perhaps you will think I am always wanting you to read, and you would like to remind me that there are many other commendable pursuits. I certainly am rather of the opinion Lowell expresses in "Democracy." He says, "Southey, in his walk one stormy day, met an old woman, to whom, by

way of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, 'any sort of weather was better than none!' I should be half inclined to say that any reading was better than

none.

Yet you are quite right about those other pursuits, and I hope you will follow them; but at the same time, if you have not already got a taste for reading, it is the most important of all tastes for you to strive to acquire, as it is very doubtful if you will manage otherwise to do so in later life. I should pity you terribly if you failed to acquire it, for you will all find life hard in one way or another, and you will find that a love of reading is even more valuable than a sense of humour in helping you over rough places. And-over and above the minor, more "worldly" support of its power of amusing and interesting you, even in the most "set grey life”—it is linked to those higher helps, without which, neither reading nor anything else will do us much good. St. Hugh of Lincoln made much of good books because he said they "made illness and sorrow endurable," and, besides this, they save you from many temptations. It has been well said, "It is very hard for a person who does not like reading to talk without sinning. ... Reading hinders castle-building, which is an inward disease, wholly incompatible with devotion.