WHAT EVERY GOOD GIRL MAY BECOME.
By Youth's Companion
THE change which forty years has brought in American social and domestic life is nowhere more marked than in the position which a young girl to-day occupies in her home. Her mother at twenty was almost sure to have been skillful with her needle, and ready and able to help her mother in the management and control of the household. The young girl of to-day is rarely in the old, simple housekeeping sense the "daughter of the house." She may attend a scientific course of cooking, or know how much farinaceous food each person should eat daily, or possibly be a member of charitable or scientific associations, but she is not fitted to take command in the kitchen and send up a savory dinner if the cook takes an abrupt departure. Does she know how much coal the family use in a winter? Can she doctor an aching tooth, or dress a burn? In the struggle and triumph of the opening of wider careers for women, there is danger that the coming generation will overlook the fact that the old occupations are after all the most useful to the world, and the noblest. A girl may or may not be qualified to be an artist, a scholar, or to enter business life, but nature fitted every woman to be a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a home-keeper. Outside of this destiny many women do lead helpful, noble lives, but they are not less exceptions to a universal law. Let the girl who reads this sing, or paint, or write, or teach, if God has given her the ability to do it; but he always gives her the ability to make the house in which she lives a happy home, and to widen its tender, holy influence.—Youth's Companion.