t by some one
else's experience, and try to show your affection for your mother. She is
the only person to whom it is safe to fully express your affection. If you
feel strongly for any one else, expressing it is apt to lead you to be
silly, or sentimental, or wanting in self-control, but little loving ways
with your mother are quite different--they are always comforting to her
and good for you. Every one of an older generation is apt to feel that the
younger one does not want them; therefore express your affection doubly to
an elder compared to what is necessary or right, or wise to an equal,
_because by nature the elder does not quite believe in it!_

I dare say you are nevertheless thinking as I used to do. "One's mother is
quite different--_she_ knows I love her best." In a way that is true, but
all I have said is true too!

III.--My third advice is: _Put some salt into every day_--the salt of
effort and self-denial. Go on with a book though it bores you. Go out for
a walk though you feel lazy. Finish some drawing or needlework, which you
would rather leave to begin something else. Make yourself do something
which you do not like, and which is useful.

And I say to all of you, not only to the leaving ones: Do not lounge
through the day just because it is holidays. You are not a little child
who has to be made to do things: you are a sensible, reasonable being, who
wants to grow. You do not leave off eating for a month, you do not leave
off growing for a month; then do not leave off growing in other ways. Do
not be _worthless_ at any time.

Some of you seem to think you will not have to give account of holidays to
God--_I_ think you will be more called to account for them, for then you
have a chance of showing your real stuff.

And when you are grown up, and quite free, feel that you are still more
responsible.

Enjoy yourself to the top of your bent, but see that each day you gain new
power to do what you ought, and what you make up your mind to do; and
remember that this power is only gained in the using--and dies out if we
do not use it. I shall be horribly disappointed if you do not gain this
power, and if you do not use it well, "to the Glory of God and the Relief
of Man's Estate."

Be ambitious--be all you were meant to be; make the world different; be
generous--freely you have received, freely give.

Some one said to me the other day, "Girls are younger nowadays, and they
go on being young till they ar