habit. The mind's initiative constantly comes in, but it is as constantly seconded by the nervous system. The time-limit in habits is one of the strong evidences of the close connection of body and mind. It is a startling fact to face that a man's personal habits are largely fixed before he is twenty; the chief lines of his future growth and acquaintance before he is twenty-five, and his professional habits before he is thirty. We are becoming bundles of habits. With every young person one must, therefore, continually urge: Are you willing to retain just the personal habits you have now? You cannot too quickly change them if you wish to make thorough work. From your early morning toilet, through the care of your clothing and the order of your room, table manners, breathing, tone of voice, manner of talking, pronunciation, gesture, motion, address, study, to your very way of sleeping at night-all your habits are setting like plaster of paris."

Home and school combine in efficient childtraining. Few determinations are more important than the right selection of a school. Teachers should be chosen with a view to the best development of children, and once a choice has been made it is due to them that they should not be discounted in the view of their pupils. No teacher can hope

for success unless there be sympathy and coöperation in the home and on the part of parents. It is not meant by this that mothers should constitute themselves a visiting board, or too frequently and too wistfully watch every lesson at home and every recitation in the schoolroom. There are mothers whose solicitude leads them into a fussiness that is to be deprecated.

What both parents and teachers desire is the real good of children. If Mary or Johnny is working too hard, and cannot do justice to all the subjects undertaken, consult the school authorities and have a subject dropped. We are so ambitious that there is sometimes peril that the children will be pushed forward too fast, and our desire for their advancement result in their wavering health. A teacher of profound insight and long experience told me that if her young people could be left to ⚫ her, and if their mothers did not try to crowd in too many outside interests and pleasures, the danger of overwork would be wholly diminished.

The school year with us begins in September. No fairer sight is ever seen than the little army that tramps steadily in the morning towards the open door of the school. Notwithstanding inherited traits, this vast army marches under a conquering flag.

Do not let us worry over the children. They belong to God even more than they belong to us. In the sunshine and the storm, God is caring for them.

HE phrase is so old-fashioned that it is almost obsolete. We hear

very little in these days about woman's sphere. A long time ago,

there was a general impression that woman's peculiar sphere was bounded by four walls and a door, the walls very high and thick, the door low, narrow, and strongly barred within and defended without. A host of prejudices and glimmering traditions disputed woman's right to leave the guarded privacy of her home and venture into the open field. She who did so was called mannish, unwomanly, or strong-minded; the last epithet causing an immediate shudder in the ranks of the conservative. As for many generations it had

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been taken for granted that women belonged to the sheltered and guarded sex, that they were to be protected by men in every peril, that their privilege was to be shielded and taken care of, and as women are naturally disposed to be cautious, the change from past conditions came slowly into actual fact.

The truth is that woman's sphere has always been more elastic and broader than the superficial imagine. Going back to the period of the Italian Renaissance, we find ladies whose learning was conspicuous in an era when women were not supposed to be taught the alphabet. But for the courage and self-sacrifice of Isabella of Castile the little ships of Columbus might never have spread their sails to discover unknown worlds. Kingdoms ruled by women have not taken the least enviable places in history. By far the richest and most sumptuous monument ever erected in any clime or age is the wonderful Taj Mahal, at Agra, India, the costly offering of a bereaved Oriental monarch to the memory of a beloved wife, a woman who must have contradicted in her own person the theory that the Eastern wife is necessarily merely a slave or a toy. Even in the changeless East there have been exceptions enough to prove the rule that the woman-soul leads on.

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