great attention bestowed on accomplishments at
that lady's establishment. Accomplishments are
very good things in their place, and we all
know that there is no gentleman (worthy of the
name) who would not prefer a brilliantly
executed piece of Chopin's to a well-served little
dinner, and who would not find consolation for
every deficiency in his table and household
arrangements, in a water-colour drawing of a
rustic cottage, with blue smoke coming out of
its chimney, a poplar or two, a half-dozen of
spruce firs emerging from its roof, and clean
agricultural children playing before its door.

There is, then, no gentleman, worthy of the
name, who would not prefer accomplishments
to housewifery—that is an established fact. But
then there is, most unfortunately, a very large
class of gentlemen who, in this respect, are
unworthy of the name. There is—I say it with
sorrow—a very large class of men who, coming
home after a hard day's work, would prefer
finding a bright little woman waiting for them
with a smiling face and a neat and supervised (if
I may be allowed the expression) dinner, to a
greeting of the most triumphant kind on the
piano, followed by a meal which gave tokens of
having been handed over to the exclusive care
of the servants. There are also certain abject men
who would hardly be consoled for a series of
mistakes in the weekly bills, by the best
watercolour drawing—as above described—ever
executed by amateur fingers; and, worst of all,
there are—I know it for a fact—some men
extant who, belonging to professions which tax
the head throughout the day to an excess, and
in which a day of great effort is not uncommonly
bestowed in vain, the work turning out a failure
after all; these men, liable, from the tension of
the brain, to occasional attacks of irritability,
and finding that such irritability is dispersed
very rapidly by a few soft and sympathetic
words uttered in a woman's gentlest tones—
these persons, I say, will hold that, when this fit
is on them, it is hardly right or kind of their
better halves to take that opportunity to give
way to temper, to answer unsympathetically or
unkindly, or even to keep a sullen silence, to
retire to the sofa and to a study of the Reverend
Puncheon Head's last volume of Sermons.

Such men as I have hinted at above exist,
and, what is more dreadful still, they are by no
means uncommon. Uncommon? I am not sure
but that they preponderate. In fact, if the
truth must out, I know that they do
preponderate.

But it will be said that a wife is not to do the
work of servants. No, she is not. But she is
to do the work that servants will not or cannot
do. No household left to servants will prosper.
That supervision spoken of above, is indispensable.
Depend upon it the household arrangements
will never go on without it. The dinners
will fail, and the bills——It is one of the
most remarkable things connected with psychological
studies to observe the tendency of the
human mind, as it is exhibited in the British
tradesman, to inaccuracy in his accounts. It is
wholly impossible to explain this phenomenon
by any other means than by attributing it to his
excessive and morbid philanthropy. He is for
ever in the most delicate manner suggesting to
you that you are too self-denying in your diet. He
is always giving you credit, in his little account,
for supplementary sweetbreads, chops which
are the children of his imagination, half-pounds
of beef-suet which were left at the door
of your next-door neighbour. His mistakes
always take this form; he never by any chance
attributes to you a sparer diet than you have
indulged in, or omits to post to your discredit
a single ounce of that thin end of the neck
which was really the joint handed last Wednesday
over your area railings. Now, all these
things require to be vigilantly looked after, and
the wretches of men have a notion that to attend
to such matters is part of woman's mission!

Are my girls thus educated, with a view to
the cultivation of those qualities which I have
shown will be expected of them? Are they
taught that one day they will have practical
duties to perform—that they will probably have
to make the most, for some years at any rate,
of a small income? It is astonishing what a
"most" may be made of it, by a little thought
and good taste. Are they taught that one day
they will have to merge their own identity in
some one else's identity? Are they initiated in
the mysteries of cooking, in the arcana of
butchers' bills? I think not.

Now, I have to propose an Institution for
girls, for their occupation during the holidays,
and at the conclusion of their education, which
shall be somewhat analogous (the difference of
sex being taken into consideration) to that
suggested for boys in the article to which I have
already alluded, as appearing a short time ago
in the pages of this journal.

My institution is, in one or two respects, to
resemble that just spoken of. A considerable
degree of attention is to be bestowed on the
bodily structure of those who should frequent
it, on its growth, its strength, its due development.
My girls don't get up early enough
in the morning, they don't take exercise enough,
they don't eat enough. They are inclined to
dawdle, to feel relieved when luncheon-time
comes, and the morning is proclaimed by that
fact to have passed away. They shall never be
allowed to dawdle, or be idle, or listless, in my
institution on any pretence whatsoever.

In developing my notion of the "GIRLS'
HOLIDAY OCCUPATION INSTITUTE," I propose
that there shall be the following classes: A
Physical-Education Class; a Cookery Class; a
Household-Bill-auditing Class; a Shirt-button-
Supervision Class; and a Mangy-Gossip-
Suppression Class. These are to begin with; many
more would suggest themselves as the project
advanced.

Some of these classes almost speak for
themselves and require but little description of the
manner in which they should be worked. The
Physical-Education Class, for instance, proclaims
by its name that every kind of drill and