A Patriotic Woman.

Miss Helen Gould has endowed the school of engineering, University of New York, with an additional $10,000, which brings her benefactions to a total of $60,000. This does not represent all that she is supposed to have contributed to the University of New York. A contribution of $250,000 was made on May 27, 1895, with the proviso that the name of the giver should be kept secret. It was generally rumored that the unknown contributor was Miss Gould, who wished in this way to make amends for the omission of any bequest to the university in her father's will. Miss Gould's benefactions to charitable and educational institutions have been countless, but so great has been her dislike to the association of her name with them that only a small part of her good work is known. Her sympathies have gone forth especially for the relief of poor children. Among the institutions under her special patronage are a home for tenement-house children, at Tarrytown, and the Kindergarten and Potted Plant Association, near that place, to which she recently gave a valuable tract of land. At the time of the great tornado in St. Louis, she immediately contributed $100,000 for the relief of the homeless sufferers. She presented a scholarship to Wellesley College a year ago, and last January gave $5000 to found a scholarship at Mount Holyoke College, in memory of her mother.

A Gift to the Lord.

There is something the dear Lord wants on earth,

That nobody else can give

Except yourself, to the blessed Lord

Who came to the earth to live;

Who walked about in its crowded ways,

And prayed in its hills alone,

Who had joyful days and sorrowful days

On this earth where He sought His own.

The something on earth which the dear Lord wants
And which only you can give,

Is the loyal love of your heart, my child,
And your earnest will to live

Soldier and servant of Christ the King,
To watch for the glance of His eye,
To cherish His honor and do His work
While the flying days go by.

There's something the dear Lord wants in Heaven,
And waits till it reach Him there,

The sight of a soul that turns from sin
And uplifts the penitent's prayer.
And you may give to our Lord in Heaven
That gift which will reach the throne,
And add a joy to the Blessed One

Who would gather home His own.

In earth, in Heaven, the dear Lord sees
Each of us quite apart

From the throng who are ever burdening
The love of His tender heart.

And each of us to the Lord may give

An offering He will take,

And prize through the ages ever more

For the humble giver's sake.

Frances Willard and the Reporter.

The Washington Post says that when Frances Willard lay dead in Chicago, among the flowers near her was a bunch of violets from a Washington newspaper woman. "I never saw Miss Willard but once," said the newspaper woman the day she sent the flowers. "It was in a Western city. I was reporter on a local paper, discouraged, overworked, blue, homesick, and altogether miserable, for I was only-well, I wasn't out of my teens, and I had been away from home only a few months. Miss Willard came to the city. I was sent to her hotel to ask her something impertinent. Miss Willard was ill, but sent word that I might come up. I found her sitting in an easy chair, very pale, but very sweet. I had only begun to tell my errand when she rose and came toward me. She put her hands on my shoulders. Why, dearie,' she said, 'how tired you look! Take my chair child.' And I-well, nobody had called me dearie' for so long, nobody had called me 'child,' that I—well, I put my head on Frances Willard's shoulder and cried it all out. I had never seen her before; I have never seen her since, but for the memory of those few kind words I say: God bless Frances Willard.”

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CHAPTER XXXVII.

College or Business?

T a certain point in his development the boy must decide, or his parents must decide for him, whether he is to leave school at fourteen or fifteen, learn a trade, or go into a factory or store, with a view to entering business life, or whether instead he shall proceed with his education, and go to college. The latter course means four years devoted to study under good instructors, and insures to the responsible sort of lad, an excellent foundation for the future. A college course is not indispensable to success. Some of our most conspicuous public men never went beyond a country school. William Dean Howells, our foremost American author, is the product of the printing office and the home library. A man may do without college, and still shine. And to some persons, not fond of study nor devoted to learning in any of its aspects, time spent in college is rather a waste. They would do better to go at once into the daily drill of counting-room or office.

College does not unfit a man for business, however. Granting that he has ability, accuracy, and the tendency to grasp the matter in hand, which is an essential of business success, his capacity will be enlarged, his mind will be a more facile tool, his powers will be broadened by the collegiate training. In certain lines of business college graduates are preferred to others, because their prolonged period of study has made them manlier, and has taught them how to cope with

men.

Apart from their direct bearing on character, the college friendships are of great value indirectly to young men. A small college equally with a large one, brings together men from widely differing homes, and from various parts of the country. Angles are rubbed off, provincialisms are softened, and men are brought nearer to each other in the attrition of the college life, as well as in its agreeable social opportunities.

Colleges for Women.

Nobody can visit a woman's college, Mount Holyoke, or Smith, Wellesley or Vassar, Wells or Baltimore, or Randolph-Macon, Barnard, Radcliffe, or any other college, without being impressed with the all-round training girls receive

in these admirable institutions. These young women will be better wives, better mothers, better daughters, for their years at college. And, if they do not marry, they will be better business women, journalists, doctors, teachers, ministers, workers in all fields, because of their college associations.

Co-Education.

A great deal may be said for co-education. As we see it at Oberlin, Cornell, Syracuse and Ann Arbor, at Brown University, at Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, it shows how natural is the arrangement which sets young people side by side in the classroom, as in the family or the church. Very little flirtation is found in the co-educational college, for there is little temptation to flirt with a man or a girl, whose Latin may be better than your own, and whose demonstration on the blackboard may put yours to shame.

Says Hamerton pithily:

Whatever you study, some one will consider that particular study a foolish waste of time.

"If you were to abandon successively every subject of intellectual labor which had, in its turn, been condemned by some advisor as useless, the result would be simple intellectual nakedness. The classical languages, to begin with, have long been considered useless by the majority of practical people-and pray, what to shop-keepers, doctors, attorneys, artists, can be the use of the higher mathematics? And if these studies, which have been conventionally classed as serious studies, are considered unnecessary notwithstanding the tremendous authority of custom, how much the more are those studies exposed to a like contempt which belong to the category of accomplishments! What is the use of drawing, for it ends in a worthless sketch? Why should we study music when, after wasting a thousand hours the amateur cannot satisfy the ear? A quoi bon modern languages when the accomplishment only enables us to call a waiter in French or German who is sure to answer us in English? And, what, when it is not your trade, can be the good of dissecting animals or plants?"

Thus, one must cultivate independence, and study what he wishes, in distinction from what is forced upon him.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Homes for Spinsters.

NE of the greatest problems the self-supporting woman in our large
cities has to face is the question of a home.
working girl without home ties live?

How and where shall the
If she has a relative to

Or

assume the care and work, or if she has herself sufficient resources and self-reliance, there is no reason why she should not keep house. if this is not feasible fortunate is she who is taken into a congenial private family. Really homelike boarding houses do exist, but not every one who seeks can find or can afford to pay for when found. The modern apartment house has possibilities of a home for three or four banding together to share work and expenses. Any one of these methods of living may be within the reach of a woman who is earning twelve dollars a week and upwards. She may weigh the disadvantages and compensations of each and choose, yet even for her the choice is not always easy.

What about girls whose weekly wage is less than eight, or even less than five dollars? What becomes of these-the young, the inexperienced, the weak, the stranger in the great city, discouraged and perhaps tempted? Where shall such find shelter, protection and wholesome social life? This matter of clean, independent, self-respecting existence for working women on small pay in large cities is so important a phase of social economics that government has turned its attention to it. The latest bulletin issued by Hon. Carroll D. Wright for the Department of Labor is devoted in part to a study of homes and clubs for selfsupporting girls, signed by Mary S. Fergusson.

Most of us are familiar with the boarding home as it exists in connection with the Women's Christian Associations, but it is not generally known how many similar homes exist on a smaller scale in various cities, under both Protestant and Roman Catholic auspices. The first organized effort in this country to offer a comfortable and attractive home to self-supporting women, at rates within the means of those earning small wages, was made in 1856 by the Ladies' Christian Union in New York City. Baltimore came next, with its Female Christian Home established in 1865. The Labor Department reports statistics of ninety boarding homes and clubs existing to-day in forty-six cities. But even in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis and Cincinnati,