ness tells you that you are now just in
the condition to enter upon your harvest. The field is before you. You
are girded for the work. And will you now indolently lay aside the
sickle, and let the golden grain fall to the ground ungathered? Could
there be a more egregious mistake? Last week, I saw from my window two
parent birds tempting their young fledglings from the nest. Day by day,
week by week, I had seen the child-birds growing and gaining strength.
Their muscles were now well developed, their bodies were clothed with
feathers, they had learned to use their wings,--they could fly. Would it
not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were,
contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to
soar? And will _you_ be content to remain forever only a fledgling,
satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually
using the wings which these years of honorable industry have given you?

Some of your sex are willing to admit the force of this argument when
applied to men. A man, after graduating, is expected of course to
continue his studies. His whole profession is one continued study. But
somehow, it is thought, this truth does not hold good for women. Let me
hope that _you_ at least will not harbor such a notion. Whatever may be
said of "women's rights," one right certainly, and one duty, is to keep
yourself abreast of the other sex in continued mental growth and
culture, and in general intelligence. If you would awaken true respect
in my sex, and I hold it a not unworthy ambition, you must in this
matter do as we do, at least as those of us do who are worth your
consideration at all. You must perseveringly, every year, add to your
intellectual acquisitions. You must continue steadily to grow in
knowledge and mental power. Do not cease your studies, because you have
ceased going to school. Manage to have some elegant accomplishment or
acquisition always in hand. A woman who is wise in this matter, never
passes her prime. I speak not, of course, of the decrepitude of old age
and of the decay of the faculties. But so long as the faculties remain
unimpaired, a woman may become, and should aim to become, increasingly
attractive, as she advances in years. Poets sing of sweet sixteen. Let
me assure you, a woman may be charming at sixty. Mrs. Madison even at
seventy was the most attractive woman in Washington.

In society, how soon one feels the difference between a person wh