; and, to do that, to make your
mind your servant, is to accomplish the greatest result of your
education. Only as far as your study and your general life here do
that, are they of any true value to you.

"You will ask me how are you to fix your attention when there are so
many things going on around you to distract your thoughts? I can only
answer, that as our minds are in many respects of different orders,
so, no general rule can be given. If you will, each one, faithfully
make the attempt, I have no doubt you will succeed, in just the same
proportion as you are faithful.

"It may be as well, as I consider this the keystone of all good study,
that I should leave the other helps and hindrances for some future
talk; and it will give me a great deal of pleasure if I can hear from
any of you at the end of a week's trial, that you have found
yourselves helped by my advice."

It speaks well for Miss Ashton's influence over her school that there
was not a pupil there who was not moved by what she had said.

To be sure, its effect was not equally apparent. There were some who
had scant minds to fix, and what nature had been niggardly in
bestowing, they had frittered away in a trifling life; but for the
earnest girls, those who truly longed to make the most of themselves
and to be able to do a worthy work in the life before them, such
advice became at once a help.

"It sounds like my mother's letter to me," Marion Parke said to
Dorothy, as they went together to their room. "She insists that it is
not so much the facts we learn, as the help they give us in the use of
our minds. I wonder if all educated people think the same?"

"All thoroughly educated people I am sure do," answered Dorothy.
"Sometimes I feel as if my mind was a musical instrument; and if I
didn't know every note in it, the only sounds I should ever hear from
it would be discords,"--at which rather Irish comparison, both girls
laughed.

CHAPTER X.

CHOOSING A PROFESSION.

There was one peculiarity of Montrose Academy that had been slow to
recommend itself to the parents of its pupils. That was the elective
system, which was adopted after much controversy on the part of the
Board of Trustees.

The more conservative insisted that the prosperity of the past had
shown the wisdom of keeping strictly to a curriculum that did not
allow individual choice of studies. The newer element in the Board
were equally sure that to oblige a girl to go throug