Work, then, girls! Work for pleasure, work for profit! Work for the
health of your bodies, and the health of your souls! "You will find
that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help
other people, will, in the quickest and most delicate ways, improve
yourselves." "When men are rightly occupied their amusement grows out
of their work, as the color petals out of a fruitful flower; when they
are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become
steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse
to the body." [Footnote: Ruskin.]

But whatever your work is, girls, do not be in too much of a hurry
for great results. If there is any thing in old countries that strongly
impresses the American mind, it is, probably, the great amount of labor,
the infinite patience, and the centuries of time, that were necessary
to construct their public edifices. We cannot understand such waits,
such slow progress. On the contrary, the fact that most impresses the
mind of a foreigner in our own streets is the hurry, impatience, rush
and scramble of American life. The people walk along the narrow streets
of Boston with such hurried steps, such deeply-seamed faces, such
infinite anxieties, as if they were about to adjust the foundations of
the earth, and had about two minutes to spare before applying the lever.
Go slowly, girls, and your work will last the longer.

Do not expect to complete your line of reading or study in one winter.
Do not await a large salary for the first year's work. Do not hope
to more than initiate a charitable society in one autumn. Then try
to remember the necessity of concentrating forces, and of bringing
your heaviest action to bear on one point: too many undertakings
dissipate strength and prostrate work. There is a great deal of poor
work done now; and it is said to have been somewhat mediocre so far