BEST OF EVERYTHING. 45 feel competent and called upon to pronounce this and that wrong, and are determined to see how long a face you can wear, and how you can most torment yourself and others, you will indeed lose your time, and wonder how you fell in with so poor a school! But if you feel determined to make the best of everything, to take everything by the smooth handle, to see the bright side of every tear, and to catch as many warm sunbeams as you can, your school-days will be happy, and be associated with nothing but what is cheerful and pleasurable. It is the time for you now to be right earnest, for the days and the weeks will now come round very rapidly. Remember that every lesson you slight, every imperfect recitation you make, is not an injury upon the teacher which will last, though it may annoy him; but the injury inflicted upon yourself will be permanent. In every contest with indolence in which you are defeated, in every struggle with difficulties in which you are worsted, in every effort made in which you do not succeed, you lose ground. You are accustoming yourself to be con 46 AN ANGEL'S WING DROOPING. quered. Let it be your ambition now, first to secure your own esteem, by diligence and application, and the actual overcoming of difficulties, and then the esteem of your teachers, by the evidence that you are determined to do all that you can, and of your companions, by their seeing you making evident progress. Away with pining after home! now is not the time for that; it is the time of action. Away with sentimentalism! you need a backbone now. Away with discontentment! you now have the best opportunity which money, care, anxiety, and experience can afford you, for improvement. It will be your misfortune if you have too little mind to be educated, your folly if you fail through negligence, and your guilt if you fail through wilful perverse ness. "Wake! ere the earth-born charm unnerve thee quite, STRENGTH TO COMPLETE. Become thy study, pastime, rest, and food, Pray Heaven for firmness thy whole soul to bind With thoughts all fixed and feelings purely kind, 47 CHAPTER III. THE SCHOOL-GIRL AT STUDY. The Great Trial. Trunks full. Nothing forgotten. A Vacant Stare. Two-thirds Lost. Memory wanting. XenoAll need Judgment. Learn to discrimiphon's Retreat. nate. Best Taste in Town. Select the Best. Knowledge Where to look. Society running away. Loose Change. of a Lapdog. Not a Short Job. Iron-hearted Bell. Habit of Toil. EVERY one who goes to school knows that, for some reason or other, the object is to study. But many seem to know nothing as to why they must study, or how to do it. I am sorry to say, too, that many parents seem as ignorant as their daughters. They know that other people send their daughter to school, and that before she arrives at that most important age of eighteen, or when she is "brought out," it is necessary to be able to say that she was educated at this or that celebrated institution. They fail in their plans and in their conversation to impress upon her the real object of her going from home to be educated. They talk much about what she needs as to dress, in order to appear well, and they talk over the privations [she will endure, and the trials she must meet, but the great trial, that of study, they hardly mention. Suppose now we were in some nook, ourselves unseen, where we could hear the conversation at the breakfast-table, between a judicious, sensible father and his daughter, who is about leaving home for school. 66 Well, daughter," says he, in a cheerful tone, "I suppose you have every thing ready to start, -trunks, bandboxes, umbrellas, and overshoes ?" "Yes, father, I believe so. My trunks are all full, and I thought I never could crowd in my new de laine, the two new silk dresses, the cream-coloured merino, the purple alpaca, and my twelve aprons. But by great efforts mother and I pressed them in, though I am afraid they will be terribly rumpled. Then I have the three bandboxes besid: s." D |