y. Unskilled and incompetent labor must take what is given;
skilled and competent labor will eventually make its own standard.
Admitting that the law of supply and demand regulates these things,
I contend that the demand for skilled labor is very great, and the
supply very small.

Start with the idea that work is _honorable_, and that you can do some
one thing better than any one else. Resolve that, God helping, you
will take care of yourself. If you are, after a while, called into
another relation, you will all the better be qualified for it by your
spirit of self-reliance; or if you are called to stay as you are, you
can be happy and self-supporting.

Poets are fond of talking about man as an oak, and woman the vine that
climbs it; but I have seen many a tree fall that not only went down
itself, but took all the vines with it. I can tell you of something
stronger than an oak for an ivy to climb on, and that is the throne of
the great Jehovah. Single or affianced, that woman is strong who leans
on God and does her best. The needle may break; the factory-band may
slip; the wages may fail; but, over every good woman's head there are
spread the two great, gentle, stupendous wings of the Almighty.

Many of you will go single-handed through life, and you will have to
choose between two characters. Young woman, I am sure you will turn
your back upon the useless, giggling, painted nonentity which society
ignominiously acknowledges to be a woman, and ask God to make you an
humble, active, earnest Christian.

What will become of this godless disciple of fashion? What an insult
to her sex! Her manners are an outrage upon decency. She is more
thoughtful of the attitude she strikes upon the carpet than how she
will look in the judgment; more worried about her freckles than her
sins; more interested in her bonnet-strings than in her redemption.
Her apparel is the poorest part of a Christian woman, however
magnificently dressed, and no one has so much right to dress well as
a Christian. Not so with the godless disciple of fashion. Take her
robes, and you take everything. Death will come down on her some day,
and rub the bistre off her eyelids, and the rouge off her cheeks, and
with two rough, bony hands, scatter spangles and glass beads and rings
and ribbons and lace and brooches and buckles and sashes and frisettes
and golden clasps.

The dying actress whose life had been vicious said: "The scene closes.
Draw the curtain." Ge