girls that it is only necessary for you to choose what you will do. But
make a choice to do something useful and worthy of your powers. You will
be happier, and you will be a better and nobler woman, for so doing. You
will be spared the discontent and restlessness of spirit which
characterize the girl with nothing in particular to do, and who often
becomes on this account a nuisance to all earnest people around her.

In order to fulfill aright the duties of any relation of life, the first
requirement the greatest necessity, next to a firm resolution and will,
is good health. Without good health there is no substantial foundation
for anything earthly. Good health is the fountain of human enjoyment and
the greatest of earthly riches. It is the great beautifier; it is the
great preservative of good looks. How strange, then, that so many girls
are so careless, so provokingly careless, of this priceless blessing!
How strange that they will wear clothing that they know tends to break
down their health; tight corsets that compress the lungs and spoil the
natural shape of the body; tight shoes that interfere with the
circulation of blood, and make their noses and hands red, and give them
predisposition to colds and coughs and nervous headaches, all of which
put to severe tests the patience and affection of those around them.
Good health is always attractive; ill-health, invalidism, nervousness,
are very apt to be repellant. Better good health than beauty, if one
were obliged to choose--which one is not, for good health is one of the
chief elements of beauty.

So, if you aim first to be good and kind and intelligent and industrious
and skillful, so that you may be fitted to guide and adorn a home should
you be blessed with one, or to be fitted to shape your life to
usefulness and independence if you never have a home of your own, and if
in connection with these aims you seek to obtain and preserve good