land's
half million of unmarried ones. Some declare that it is impossible to
make the labor of single women remunerative, or their lives free and
happy. But if the occupations of women were raised and diversified as
much as they might be, such impossibility would of itself be impossible.
If it is to be granted that a woman possesses only inferior powers, let
her be taught to use such powers as she has.

I doubt not that He who created woman has some mission, some purpose,
for those who, in His divine ordering, remain single. There is a church
which has taken note of this great fact, and devotes its single women to
cloisters or to hospitals, sometimes to useful objects, sometimes to
improper ones,--but seeing that they are a numerous class, it has
specifically appropriated them. I presume the lesson of a single life,
the necessity of living alone, must be a difficult one to learn. The
heart, the young heart always, is perpetually seeking for something to
love. Amid the duties of the household, around the domestic fireside,
this loving spirit has room for growth, expansion, and intensity. The
soft tendrils which it is ever throwing out find gentle objects to which
they may cling with indissoluble attachment. Solitude is fatal to the
household affections. The single woman lives in a comparative
solitude,--a solitude of the heart.

Yet it cannot be denied that even such hermitesses find compensations in
their retirement. If one resolve to remain single,--and it must require
strength of mind to come to this determination,--it is remarkable how
Nature fits such a woman for a position for which she could not have
been created. She takes her stand with a power of endurance not exceeded
by that of the other sex, and becomes more independent and at ease than
they. Let man's condition be what it may, whether rich or poor, he will
find his home cheerless and uncomfortable without the presence of a
woman. His desolateness at an hotel or boarding-house is proverbial. He
is unceasingly conscious that he has no home. But the single woman can
create one for herself.

Go into the cells of any prison for women, and those who never visited
such abodes will be astonished at the neatness, the order, the
embellishments, which many of them display. The home feeling that seems
to be natural to most of us develops itself here with affecting energy.
No man could surround his penitential cell with graces so profuse and
pleasing as do some of th