ake
her stand at the top of one of these long flights of stairs--the last in
the building, perhaps--reaching up to the floor where the High school
rooms are almost always located; let her watch the flushed faces of a
class of girls coming up to recitation, note the palpitating, almost
breathless efforts with which some of them achieve the last few steps;
and when they have accomplished this, see here and there one clinging to
the post of the balustrade, or leaning speechless against the wall until
she can recover breath to proceed another step; let her do this, and she
will get another insight into the causes of invalidism among the girl
graduates of our schools. "How can a mother rest when she doesn't know
where her boys are?" we often hear asked. How can a mother rest when
she doesn't know where her girls are, or by what dangerous steps they
have gone where they are? How can she rest? Simply, in most instances,
because she has not herself been educated to any comprehension of the
danger her child is in.

Neither did school-girls, in that earlier time, perform their brain
labor under an outside pressure scarcely less than that of one of those
iron helmets which one sees in the Tower of London, and which, the guide
assures us, with an emphasis implying that he does not expect us to
believe it, were actually worn by some Knight at the battle of Cressy,
Agincourt, or some other which resulted in victory to the English. And
how those old warriors did bear up under a head-gear weighing ten or
twelve pounds, to fight the battles of their age, I have been best able
to comprehend when I have seen what girls of our age can bear up under
and live at all, much more, study.

I have a friend, an old pupil, a truly intellectual woman, who has not
broken down under much more brain-work, since she left school, than she
ever performed in school. Her husband greatly enjoys her intellectual
tastes, and, without stint or jealousy, encourages them; only he would
not have her "odd," nor so very different from "other ladies of our
acquaintance." He would have her study; he "doesn't believe a woman
should fall back in her intellectual life any more than a man." He would
have her paint, and practise, and study; and since he provides abundant
help, he thinks she may. He will buy any book, or set of books, to aid
her; but he would have her wear her hair as "other ladies wear theirs,
and not give occasion for all those flings about women who wan