u would condemn, and your own way of
answering back? You cannot get out of bad habits all at once, but get
your ideal right, and you will grow to it. If you are not living in your
own family, and feel inclined to resent orders, remember the days of
chivalry, when all pages (often princes by birth) spent their youth
serving in other people's houses, and learning the motto of every true
knight, "I serve."

And whether with strangers or at home, remember Him Who was subject unto
His parents, Him of Whom Jephthah's daughter was but a faint type.

A Home Art; or, Mothers and Daughters.

Know your own work, and do it.

This is a simple sounding rule, but we all find practical difficulties in
following it. You have most of you lately left school, and I think the
difficulty of the first part of this saying must have struck some of you.
At school you knew your own work,--you had a certain time-table, you
walked with the crutches of routine; and when you left school and found
your day mostly at your own disposal, you learnt that a free life is far
more difficult, and therefore far nobler, than a life under direction.

It was pleasant at first to be able to carry out your own fancies, but you
awoke after a while to the fact that you were not spending holidays but
living your real life; and then the thought must have come, if you had any
stuff in you, "I must anyhow live my life; am I living it nobly?"

How can you live a noble life? Bacon gives us, perhaps, the best answer
when he says that "the end of all learning should be the Glory of God and
the Relief of Man's Estate." Shall this be the result of your school
learning? Others can speak to you from experience, as I cannot, of the
glory and happiness of a life spent in the Relief of Man's Estate: I would
speak to you of a preliminary stage of work for that relief, of some of
the difficulties which beset girls on first leaving school, and owing to
which so much noble aspiration and unselfish enthusiasm run to waste.

I believe one of the main difficulties is _friction at home_; a difficulty
on which I the rather dwell because it is harder, for those who know you
personally, to speak of it without irritating you, or else criticizing
your home. How is this home difficulty met? Some meet it by leaving
home,--which reminds me of the minister who said in his sermon, "This is a
serious difficulty in our belief, my brethren; let us look it boldly in
the face,--and pass