women will go to, and will cheerfully discuss as the natural amusements of ladies and gentlemen. So, too, with reading. Some women, no doubt, do not care for Browning; and some are ashamed to speak of him for fear they shall be called pedantic: yet few are ashamed to know all the transient novels of the day; and some are chagrined if they cannot keep abreast of the stories in the leading magazines, as some are troubled if they do not know what is going on at the principal theatres. You educated women can exert a vast influence on the reading taste of the next generation against vulgarity and unscrupulousness in what is called "journalism;" against novels and plays that tend to undermine the sacredness of marriage; against plays in which low women drilled by lower men are the chief attraction: and you can exert this influence, not by public invectives which advertise and encourage what they con

demn, not by ostentatious virtue, but by the quiet abstinence which assumes that those whom you love will love whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report; not by the blind innocence of a child, but by the clear-seeing, intelligent earnestness of a woman who abhors that which is evil and cleaves to that which is good. In the days when you have to "make time" for reading, read your newspaper to learn what is doing in the world, -not to learn that "the bride [whom you do not know] was charmingly gowned in white satin," or that the divorced wife of some secondrate actor is expected to marry a Wall Street broker, or that the police have unearthed a new witness in the trial of Pietro Mazzi for the murder of his rival. There is much wisdom in that observation of Thoreau's: "If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown

up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winterwe never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

"To read well," says the same philosopher, "that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent." Keep in training; read daily if you can- and you nearly always can - a little of "the best that has been known and thought in the world." As some one has said, adapting the Scripture, "Keep the windows open toward Jerusalem." Learn some things by heart for dark and wakeful hours, and see how the poetry reveals itself more and more clearly, till the obscure is full of meaning and the great and high and

simple has increased its own meaning tenfold. What are murder and millinery to such reading as this?

Let us consider for what the intellectual life of a girls' college chiefly stands: not for the belittling of those graceful accomplishments which add to the joy of life, but for something solid, to which, if time serves, those accomplishments may be added; not for what is called, almost in cant, self-development, unless self-development is to end in self-forgetfulness; not for a life of exclusive specialization, which is too often an arid life; not for such a reaction from overfemininity as shall lead to absorption in clubs and politics. It stands for the development, in a woman, of a clear-headed integrity which, when supported by her intuitive insight, makes her life the best human standard of right and wrong. The untrained woman sometimes amazes us by such untruthfulness as would ostracize a man. An extreme example is Nora

in Ibsen's " A Doll's House." When her husband is sick, she raises money to take him on a journey; and she raises it by forging a signature. Confronted with the charge of crime, she fails to see the point: "Do you mean to say that it was wrong to save my husband's life?"

Mr. Meredith, you may remember, in "Diana of the Crossways," makes his heroine, who is betrothed to a minister of state and has run heavily into debt entertaining him and his friends, sell to a newspaper a state secret he has given her overnight. This instance is hardly fair, since those of us who have watched Diana up to the fatal moment believe (we think we know) that such a woman could not do such an act, and suspect that her betrayal of the Honorable Percy is a tour de force of Mr. Meredith, who needs somehow to get the Honorable Percy out of the way and to clear the deck for Tom Redworth, the man of Mr. Meredith's choice; yet the mere fact that this