The grasshopper may not yet be a burden, nor any faculty of mind or body be seriously impaired, and still, in the "giving out" which comes more frequently and with less apparent reason than of old, in the shrinking from novel enterprises and the greater the dread of risks, above all in the growing sense of loneliness in a world from which the boys and girls of one's own generation are departing, the middle-aged begin to appreciate the approach of night. They are sometimes aware that, so far as the outward is concerned, they have arrived at late afternoon, while in many essentials of the inward life it is still morning with them. They feel unspeakably opposed to being laid upon the shelf.

"I don't want to outlive my usefulness," says one weary housewife, going on with tasks which she might appropriately delegate, but which she declines to relinquish, possibly in the fear that if once resigned she will never again be able to take them up. "I am able to wait on myself, thank you," declares an aged man, refusing the proffer of assistance from a lad so curtly that the lad turns away with the air of one who has received a snub.

It behooves those who would really help the dear old people to use great tact in their manner of doing it. There are unobtrusive attentions which loving interest prompts, and these may be so offered that they give no offence, convey no implication of superiority.

Let the chair of the oldest person in the household always be placed with a view to the best light, the greatest comfort. Nothing need be said on the subject. It is a simple matter of kind forethought. Let the grandmother, with the failing eyes, find a number of needles threaded in her needle-book, so that when she wishes to sew or to mend she may not be hindered by the slowness of threading needles nor obliged to ask that this favor be done for her.

Above all do not borrow the little possessions, the books, the toilet luxuries and the personal property of elderly people without leave. Indiscriminate borrowing in the household is always a mistake. When it meddles with the comfort of the old it is almost a crime.

Don't leave the old people out of your planning. One of the most thoughtless forms of cruelty, and I regret to observe one of the commonest, is the assumption that old people have lost their interest in the everyday work and pleasures of life.

Plenty of Praise.

Everybody is ready to pet and praise the forward child, the child whose cleverness reflects credit upon his parents and teachers, and whose attainments are felt a testimonial to his school and to forecast for himself a successful future when to be school days shall be over. Father and mother point with pride to Willie's

certificates of progress, to Willie's prizes, to Willie's proficiency in arithmetic and grammar, to Willie's fondness for study and the ease with which he acquires difficult lessons. Boys have generally some marked characteristic or other which enables a parent to praise them without sacrificing truth.

Experiment at home and find out what the boy can do best, and thus help him and his teacher in the school room.

Let him follow his own bent.

Again, a child is sometimes backward because, in a graded school, he or she is not adjusted properly to the rank selected. The preparatory work may have been imperfectly done and the poor little backward pupil may be, in reality, toiling far harder, and with more conscientious effort, than the brilliant comrade who surpassed him with so little difficulty. Class-room triumphs do not always tell when the race is run in the later life, and the qualities of diligence, fidelity and respon

THE TWO ROADS.

sibility are incomparably beyond some which make a greater show, as, for instance, facility, a talent for memorizing and a readiness to imitate.

The backward child may indeed be deficient in application not in capacity. Should this be so, arouse him, not by a hailstorm of nagging or a downpour of fault-finding but by a system of rewards lovingly adapted to his disposition and character. Suffer no discouragement to creep into your

own heart concerning him, and

do not allow him or her to feel that there is reason for any doubt about the reaching the top of the ladder in due season. The top, mind, not the middle rounds, any one can reach these. Set a definite aim before your child, cultivate a high and noble ideal, but be willing to climb slowly. Haste is at the root of many a failure, haste and lack of thoroughness as one goes on.

I pity the woman whose life was early spoiled. A great wrong was done

to the little daughter and her daughter may perhaps suffer from the same old mistake, for wrongs are far-reaching. Be pitiful and just to the backward child in your home.

Wanted A Do-Nothing Club.

I have written the phrase, my sisters, and it glares at me from the top of my page, as it will glare unwinkingly at you from the top of this talk when it is bewitched into beautiful type. Now that it is written, I don't mind telling you that I have what the Scotch call a "scunner" against the phrase. Few distinctions appear to me so undesirable as that of the "busy" woman, as if, forsooth, there were anything extraordinary or even particularly praiseworthy in the situation it describes. I do not admire the busy woman, nor the condition of mind, body and estate in which the woman whose friends think of her as busy moves and has her being.

I do admire with my whole heart and soul the woman who has work to do and does it, and gets it out of the way. There are people who are not forever engaged in the machine shops and factories of life, in its kitchens and drawingrooms, its highways and byways; they so plan and so carry forward their occupations and engagements that they now and then have leisure, have time to pause, take breath, rally their forces and then go on again. It would hurt none of us to take a hint from nature, who has vast affairs on her hands all the time, but who never suffers herself to be moved out of her regular routine to any great degree. Go into her orchards and vineyards, her fields and her gardens, now that the fruitage and the harvest and the bloom are well-nigh over, and you will see how beautifully and tranquilly she, the ever young, the ever fair, rests after her labors and in them.

"All the ladies are so busy," writes my friend from the far-off Southwestern city, where women used to have the charm of repose. "The girls are so fearfully busy," I read in a sweet girl's letter-bless her heart for the adverb, meant to express American and youthful intensity, but dear to me because, in sober and honest everyday English, I do think it the statement of a "fearful" fact. "Mamma is so busy," says my boy acquaintance; "I've been wanting to talk a thing over with her and come to a decision, but the fellows are pressing for my answer, and I'll have to go ahead myself.”

"No; I don't see my wife any more," complains a professional man. "She is even busier than I am myself, and we salute each other in the distance and bid good-by to companionship. It's not her fault; it's her misfortune and mine."

Busy? Yes, the truth must be owned, but busy about what? In towns, with Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon and Saturday evening clubs, classes,

fairs, receptions, committees, associations, societies, etc., with studying this thing and that, with adding town housekeeping to individual home-making, with going to lectures and discussions, and musicales and art exhibitions, and launching this elocutionist, and raising funds for that asylum, and putting health, life, energy, strength, all there is of power in womanly physique, and helplessness in womanly sympathy, into excellent and admirable channels, into activities against which let no man raise hand or voice, but the cumulative might of which overwhelms the busy women who tug at them until they suddenly drop down and drift into nervous prostration or kindly death.

Busy, in the country with less absorbing yet equally health-draining work, which includes a great deal of drudgery of the relentless and nerve-exhausting type, and a great deal of traditional and supposed-to-be essential drudgery, which is offensive to God and murderous to the women who practice it.

My sister, every needless bit of a task which you undertake, needless, mind, simply because you were brought up to believe in a certain mistaken old adage

that

Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

is, whatever you may fancy, a sin. To work is entirely honorable and virtuous. To rest is equally honorable and equally virtuous. To be a woman of occasional leisure is as much your duty as to be a busy woman, driven by a motive power which forces you to incessant occupation.

"Change of work is rest," says a gentle and deprecating voice in my ear. "To a certain extent, yes," I reply, but whether always it is rest enough I wonder, and am not convinced as I look about me. I think that most of us, some voluntarily, others involuntarily, some because they are caught in the wild whirl and cannot help themselves, some because they have a horror of idleness or of being thought lazy, most of us, for one reason or for another, do very much moře than we ought. We are worn out too early, and then we hug to our souls another old adage, "Better to wear out than to rust out," as though there were any question of rusting in the matter.

Let me tell you what comes of idle hands when they are a mother's or a wife's. Satan does not find mischief for them, not at all. They learn a trick of straying softly over a schoolboy's brow, of caressing a husband's work-worn palms, of smoothing out a girl's puzzles, or lying folded and at ease in their owner's lap, while her face loses anxious lines and her eyes close, and she forgets for a brief space some of her ever present cares.

I would be very glad if to our multitudinous clubs this winter we might add this one, the Do-nothing-take-one's-comfort-club, where busy women might learn how to grow idle and take life less fiercely.