You have duties in the holidays as well as in school time. It is wrong to
spend two months in self-indulgence without any self-discipline. You must
open your eyes to your duties,--practising, sensible reading, tidiness,
and daily unselfishness.

It may be no one's business to remind you in the holidays, and your mother
may let you alone a good deal, from wishing you to have "a good time;" but
you alter very considerably during two months, and it is your part to see
that you alter for the better.

Two months means two Communions with definite resolves, two definite
upward stages in life. If you let yourself go till you get back to the
crutches of school, you will have gone two very definite stages downhill.

Some of you are tidy here, but at home your temptation is to plaster some
neatly folded garment or sash over the recesses of an untidy drawer, or to
use anything that comes to hand, any racquet, or croquet-mallet, or
oil-can, or thimble; your own cannot be found--you take the nearest and
then leave that also lying about.

Do you think these things do not matter? You would think it mattered very
much if you grew up an unreliable, unconscientious woman, and yet, I do
not know in what lesson-book you can learn to be thorough and reliable and
conscientious, except in the daily lesson-book of these trifles.

You each know that daily practise is a duty, if your mother wishes you to
learn music. A daily duty neglected, or a daily duty done, means a very
considerable difference in the person by the end of two months.

There are one or two further points in your holiday and grown-up life