ripped over a stone, and her aunt availed herself of the pause to say--

"Add Shakespeare and the musical glasses, and you will have a tolerably
complete programme before you."

"Yes, Aunt Rachel, you need not laugh, you always say girls are so
uneducated, and can't respond to literary allusions; but how are they to
become educated when there is so much to be done?"

"My dear Urith, there is a very wise Irish proverb, 'Never cross a bridge
till you come to it,' and though this bridge of culture seems such a
bridge of sighs to you, I really do not think it need be. In the first
place, it has not got to be crossed in one year. You get far more law now
than in my young days, for you and your friends are not expected to come
out full-blown heroines at seventeen or eighteen; you are almost expected
to carry on your education for some time longer. It is not safe to count
on it, for real life may come on you in a dozen ways when you once leave
the safety of the schoolroom, but you will probably get several years of
tolerable quiet, and, if I were you, I would not spend my first year in a
desperate effort to fill up all the gaps in my education, and to go on
with school-work in the school spirit. I should take my first year of
freedom as the arbour on the Hill Difficulty, where Christian rested; the
lord of that country does not like pilgrims to stay there for good, but
they go on all the better for it afterwards. I should look on this year as
being the ornamental fringe to the intellectual dress you have been
weaving for yourself at school. And do not forget that the dress and the
trimming are not an end in themselves--they are only to enable you to
leave the house with decency, to go about your business; and at the end of
the first year I should count up my possessions and see where I was
wanting--if the dress proved thin, I would then set to work and furnish
myself with a jacket, by hard, steady work in the second year."

"But some of my school-work will be wasted if I don't keep it up."

"Quite true; but do not keep it up simply because you have once begun it;
some of your lessons will have done their work by ploughing and harrowing
your mind, and may be left behind. The use of school is to teach you how
to use your mind, and to try your hand at several branches of study, that
you may be able to follow whichever suits you."

"But I have not got any particular turn for anything, and it seems a pity
to drop things."

"Y