occupations an average girl may undertake. I gladly refer to certain
books which contain statistics of work and its profits, or which suggest
occupations: "The Working Girls of Boston," by Carroll D. Wright; "Think
and Act, Men and Women, Work and Wages," by Virginia Penney; "What
Girls Can Do," by Phillis Brown.

My poor girls, who work so hard, so very hard, who seem daily to narrow
all enjoyment, and to give your very existence to factories and looms,
to dry-goods counters and ready-made clothing stores, who put your
eyes out earning twenty-five cents a day, and sometimes put your souls
out trying to keep breath in your bodies one short year more,--what
shall I say to you? I cannot find the words to tell you what I would
say. Your experience shall not be embittered by being told what to
do and what not to do. Bear your work as well as you can, try to find
something really good about it, do not slight it. Remember you make
the world noble; and, if you have an absorbing desire to work in some
other way, watch every little loop-hole of opportunity, and see if
you cannot make it large enough to jump through to a wider field. Let
us all avoid fickleness, however,--the doing a little of this and of
that: it is poor economy. To grow up to a work, to master it, we must
first be slaves to it. Girls, everywhere, make progress
slowly,--_grow_ in efficiency, and do not shoot up into it.

Now, I want to talk a little to the girls who have leisure,--so much
of it, sometimes, that it all turns crazy on their hands, and expends
itself in the last most fashionable excitement. Girls too often do
things just because other girls are doing them, never for a moment
considering fitness or ability; consequently they look back upon half-
accomplished bits of work--this or that insanity in worsted, card-board,
wood-carving, modelling, or darning--very much as they would upon