ry
kind and degree of trickery; come straight up to a full and strict
compliance with every rule; lay your plans to occupy usefully each
golden moment of leisure; cultivate a constant sense of dependence upon
God for success in study: and your success will be as certain as is the
wish for it, which I once more, most respectfully and affectionately,
tender you.

* * * * *

3. _To a Young Lady on Leaving a Boarding-School._

You are about to leave school. The occasion is one certainly that cannot
fail to awaken reflection. I suppose that no young lady, who had been at
a place of education as long as you have been here, ever left it without
serious thought. The excitement of the examination, the busy whirl of
preparation for leaving, even the exhilarating anticipations of
home-going, cannot entirely shut out from your mind the sober truth that
the end of school-days is only the beginning of another career,--a
career, the issue of which you can neither foresee, nor can you be
indifferent to it. Let us talk a little about this.

The day on which a young man ends his College course is called, by an
apparent misnomer, "Commencement" day; that is, the day of commencing,
or beginning. I understand very well that the name has a definite
historical origin,--that in the old English Colleges, from which our
American Colleges were modelled, the young man, on this day, begins his
career as a Bachelor of Arts. His academical rank "commences" and dates
from this point. But there would be a beautiful appropriateness in the
term, even if it had no such special historical origin. The exit from
the curriculum of the College or School, is, in truth, only the entrance
into a more extended course. When your studies are nominally ended, they
have really only begun. The longer you live, the more will you
understand that the period of school-going is not the only, or even the
main time of learning. The more thoroughly you have been taught here,
the more certainly will you be a learner hereafter. I want no better
test of the character of a school than the extent to which the idea
prevails among its pupils and alumni, that it is a place for "finishing"
one's studies. The idea is on a par with that of the young Miss who
reported that she had read through Latin!

There is, it is true, in this School, a definite curriculum of studies,
and that curriculum you have honorably completed. You have just been
received by