up person's helplessness inspires into children, proffer their requests, scamper off with some of the dainties given them by "Maimie's" own hand from her sicktable. We will have a handy sick-table from a pattern I have in my eye, and a pretty "invalid's service of china" to brighten us up. Why should we be dowdy because we are sick? We will have your bed wheeled where you can have a view from the window of a panorama of garden, fields, woods, a high road, as Harriet Martineau recommended. We will rather borrow a real live, crowing, kicking baby, and lay it on your bed, in order to have no specific of Florence Nightingale's untried. We will transmit to you kind tokens from, and good news of friends and acquaintances; and when you direct me to inquire if Jetty Hoare has got the pattern from the trimming of the skirt of your tarletane which she wanted particularly, and bid me pull your lily of the valley and violets, or roses and jessamine, and make them into a bouquet, and ask Jetty, with your love, to wear them when she goes to see her brother capped at the college, or to attend the college dons' ball, Jetty will bless you for thinking of her, value your bouquet more than all the hothouse flowers in England, as something bringing good luck to her and hers, (though Jetty never had any imagination,)—and the bouquet is precious in this sense, that Jetty has shed.

on it the purest pearls and brighest diamonds, which can ever gem bouquet on earth.

If it be His will, we are taking the likeliest mode, with your medical man's care, to bring you through your illness, and restore you to your place in the Father's house here. Please God, we will soon have our pet back again among us, gathering lavender spikes and rose leaves in her garden, like her grandmother, or sorting her specimens like that grandmother's granddaughter, working and singing and looking us in the face with that saddest look of the eyes—that look which sees something we cannot see, passed away for many a day, perhaps never to be seen again by us, in Mary's eyes.

We will do all this and more, and we will leave the issues of life and death in God's hands, only foretelling that if it be His will that you should be removed from us, to dwell in the eternal city which hath foundations, in the many mansions of the Father's house yonder, the memory of your sickroom, where, amidst so much suffering there was so much happiness, where all the relations of earth were, as it were, gilded with a heavenly light and sanctified, will remain to your mourning friends as the purest, most blessed, and most cherished of their associations.

Believe me, Mary, no sick-room can be healthy in

spirit, any more than a convent or a hermit's cell is healthy, unless the air of God's earth, which is still near and present, as well as the air of His heaven, which is still distant and absent, blow freely through it, and the currents meet and mingle in their coming and going. Such a sick-room, where heaven and earth are in union and communion, where true worldliness falls away, and bad habits drop off, and the purged eye, in the clear, serene atmosphere, corrects many an error, is both to the sick man or woman, and the nurses, very near to the gate of heaven.

CHAPTER XV.

INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS.

German Training to Industry-Ancient Needlework –Waste of Time-Danger of Trifling it Away.

I

AM persuaded that there is one great loss which we have sustained in our transition from old-fashioned to modern education, and in the difference between German education in some of the government schools at least, and English education. I am particularly struck with it, Mary, when I see the difficulty you have in persevering in a tiresome piece of work-a pair of great knitted knickerbocker stockings, for instance, or even an elaborate bit of embroidery-I mean the cultivation of application.

Now, a young German girl must not only be grammatically and accurately acquainted with French and English, æsthetically learned in Schiller, artistically taught in music and drawing, before she can get a diploma from her college; but by the time she has attained a certain tender number of years, she must have knitted one or more pairs of stockings on the

easiest principle, and done a certain amount of simple needlework. At the end of two or three more years she must have knitted more pairs of stockings on a more complicated plan, and done more difficult needlework. And on the great era of her confirmation, she must celebrate it and quit her school with credit, by the execution of such a laborious and highlywrought specimen of needlework, in the form of a pocket-handkerchief, as must have employed her for more hours than there are days in the year, tried her eyesight, affected her health, and is entitled to be preserved with pride for the rest of her days, and displayed with exultation as an exploit worthy of imitation to daughters and granddaughters.

In the same line, who has not marvelled at the amount of industry and steady devotion to an object evidenced in our grandmother's satin pieces, landscapes worked in hair, linen bed curtains and quilts embroidered in silks, none of them executed in the splashing, dashing stitches, the rattling crotchet and coarse knitting of recent times, but in infinitesimally small stitches, done on infinitesimally fine threads with the ungrudged dedication of the better part of many months and years! I have seen one aristocratic achievement, which did not range over years but over lives, and was known as the Countesses' Bed, having been the work of three noble dames in